Investigating the association between weather conditions, calendar events and socio-economic patterns with trends in fire incidence: an Australian case study

Fires in urban areas can cause significant economic, physical and psychological damage. Despite this, there has been a comparative lack of research into the spatial and temporal analysis of fire incidence in urban contexts. In this paper, we redress this gap through an exploration of the association of fire incidence to weather, calendar events and socio-economic characteristics in South-East Queensland, Australia using innovative technique termed the quad plot. Analysing trends in five fire incident types, including malicious false alarms (hoax calls), residential buildings, secondary (outdoor), vehicle and suspicious fires, results suggest that risk associated with all is greatly increased during school holidays and during long weekends. For all fire types the lowest risk of incidence was found to occur between one and six a.m. It was also found that there was a higher fire incidence in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods and there was some evidence to suggest that there may be a J. Corcoran (&) School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia e-mail: [email protected] G. Higgs GIS Research Centre, Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods, Faculty of Advanced Technology, University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd CF37 1DL, UK e-mail: [email protected] D. Rohde Institute of Social Science Research (ISSR), University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] P. Chhetri School of Management, College of Business, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] 123 J Geogr Syst DOI 10.1007/s10109-009-0102-z