The capital’s conflagrations have joined buses, toilets and gangs in the map room in a new cartographical offering from the London Fire Brigade.
We at Londonist love our maps and the LFB's fire map is a fascinating, though somewhat sobering addition to our list. Click here to see it.
Want to know how many malicious false alarms there were in one year? Newham tops the list with 161 incidents, Tower Hamlets comes second with 121 and Croydon had 117. To put this into some sort of context, the London average is 68 which is an awful lot of bored teenagers wasting the Fire Brigade’s time. Croydon (204) and Hillingdon (187) have the highest arson figures.
The numbers of actual fires are higher than you might imagine too. Southwark’s 617 fires leave us surprised that it’s still standing, Westminster wasn’t far behind with 606 but Croydon manages to beat its false alarm record with 638 fires. The average is 417. Southwark must also have some very dodgy lift maintenance – 1005 incidents were rescuing people stuck in them. The City of London is the least busy with the lowest number of incidents attended.
Like the Met’s crime map, it can be used to gather data on incidents the fire brigade are called to. The London Fire Brigade also hope it will raise awareness about safety. Chairman of London Fire Authority’s Community Safety Committee, Councillor Susan Hall said:
‘London’s firefighters have done an excellent job of making the capital safer in recent years but there are still some areas that are having too many fires. The map shows that fires happen each and every day across London – what better incentive could there be for people to make sure it doesn’t happen to them?’
Sadly, there are no figures for cats stuck in trees.
