Main Street fire sparks debate: Is Salt Lake City a hotspot for structure fires?

Are there more fires in Salt Lake City than in other U.S. cities?

It’s a question that some are asking after a series of fires destroyed buildings along the Wasatch Front.

A high-profile fire in our community destroyed four businesses on Main Street last week. The loss of Los Tapatios, London Belle, Whiskey Street, and White Horse really was significant, with initial damages estimated at $5 million or more, to say nothing of the sentimental and historical loss.

Last month, a lawnmower hit a rock and sparked a fire that destroyed two apartment buildings in Millcreek. Then, on Tuesday, a fire broke out at an Ogden apartment building, displacing residents and causing $600,000 in damage.

It made me curious — do we have an issue with fires here in Salt Lake City? The good news is that we have a pretty good database of fire information to analyze here.

The National Fire Incident Reporting System

The National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) was started 50 years ago in response to a federal report that explained just how little we knew about fire in America, and how much we might benefit from a nationwide data collection effort. Now, fire departments submit information on each incident they encounter. Since the creation of NFIRS, the number of fires per 1,000 people has dropped, as desired. Win one for numbers.

States vary on whether reporting fires to the NFIRS is mandatory by law. In Utah, it is not. But Utah’s traditionally been regarded as “consistent, high-quality” data anyway, one of just 12 states that met that benchmark in the last audit of the data. Overall, roughly 75% of the U.S. fires are represented in the data.

Logistically, that data requires about 16 GB of storage per year. (I wanted to look at the post-pandemic era, so we’re examining fires from 2021 through 2024.)

That’s too big to play with in Excel — my usual data analysis strategy. Instead, I needed to code something that goes through all of that information and counts fires marked as building fires in each city, as well as those fires’ costs.

ChatGPT Enterprise was quite helpful here, turning what would have been a weeks-long coding project for me into something that only took a couple of days to nail down. Then, the code was run on a local machine to remove the possibility of data hallucination (always a concern when AI is involved), and cross-verified with reports from various fire departments to make sure the program’s outputs were in the right ballpark.

Most fires end up being contained — a trash fire that doesn’t escape a dumpster, or a chimney fire that doesn’t spread. NFIRS code 111 is for any kind of building fire that is non-contained, though, and that’s what we’re really talking about here, so I compiled just those fires across every city in the dataset with more than 100,000 residents, 318 cities in all. (Code 111 also doesn’t count fires in mobile homes, motorhomes, or other kinds of portable buildings.)

I also compiled those fires’ “property loss” cost estimates. Fire departments make rough (sometimes very rough) estimates as to the cost of the property value lost in the fire, and report those with the NFIRS system as well.

Now, you should know: FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, expressly states in their suggested guidelines of using NFIRS data that making area vs. area comparisons isn’t usually advisable. After all, if Fire Department A reports 100% of its fires to NFIRS, and Fire Department B reports 50% of its fires, we get an overall 75% reporting rate ... but the data is likely going to make it look like there are more fires in Department A’s hometown when that’s not supported by the evidence.

The Salt Lake City Fire Department told me it reports 100% of fires to the NFIRS, the exact situation we’re concerned about. If SLC comes back with a relatively high number of fires, this may be the reason. On the other hand, if our numbers report Salt Lake City with a relatively average or low number of fires, we’ll know that the hypothesis of SLC fires being out of control is untrue.

So how did Salt Lake City stack up?

Overall, Salt Lake City saw 342 building fires from 2021-24, according to the data. That ranks it 134th in our dataset of 318 cities. Houston ranked first in terms of building fires reported to NFIRS, followed by Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York.

On a per-capita basis, there have been roughly 163 building fires per 100,000 residents in Salt Lake City, ranking it 152nd. (Per capita, it is Dayton, Ohio; Columbia, S.C.; Fayetteville, N.C.; Detroit; and Peoria, Ill. that complete the top five in building fires nationally.)

Despite the largest fire department reporting 100% of its fires to the NFIRS database, the city ranks nearly in the middle of the nation in terms of overall fires and fires per capita.

There is one caveat, though: Salt Lake City is among the nation’s leaders in the amount of money those fires have cost. Salt Lake City ranks 21st in terms of building fire cost over the last four years, with an estimated $71.5 million in property value lost.

That means an average of just over $209,000 per fire, which ranks fifth in the U.S. overall.

Oceanside, Calif., ranked number one, and saw a pier and associated buildings burn in 2024. Boulder, Colo., experienced the Marshall Fire, which turned a grass fire spread via extreme winds that burned $27 million worth of homes in 2021.

The other cities in the top five — Charlotte, N.C., Aurora, Colo., and Salt Lake City — all experienced one massive apartment construction fire that made up most of the cost. In Charlotte, that was a 239-unit apartment building that burned just before it was ready to open, in Aurora, an apartment building under construction worth $150 million was destroyed due to fire.

And in Salt Lake City, the majority of the fire cost figure for the whole city is due to the $55 million estimate of the apartment building that burned at 2188 S. Highland Drive in 2022, with 186 units under construction. That fire’s cause was narrowed down to two potential culprits, according to Salt Lake Tribune reporting in 2023: “the propane-fueled ‘salamander’ heaters, and small ‘spider boxes’ set up throughout the site to provide temporary power to workers.”

To be sure, these apartment building fires are of a different type than what we saw on Main Street. The cause is still under investigation, but David Tran, a co-owner of London Belle, has said firefighters responded to a small grease fire that was contained to the kitchen that night. They soon cleared the building to reopen, Tran said, but then noticed flames coming from the roof as they were set to leave.

But this data simply doesn’t seem to fit into the idea that Salt Lake City is a hotspot for structure fires.

Utah’s capital is near the middle of the pack in terms of building fires overall and per capita, even given better-than-normal reporting to the NFIRS.

That doesn’t mean that the fires we’ve experienced aren’t worth addressing, though. It’s worth noting that construction sites, especially at apartment complexes, seem to have consistent remediable danger spots that would reduce these costly fires. And my colleagues have public records requests out on the Main Street fire’s inspection records that might shed light on how that fire could have been prevented.

These fires in Salt Lake City have caused significant losses. But overall, the data seems to indicate Salt Lake City isn’t burning more than you would reasonably expect.

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