Last year, 92 people died in 7,414 apartment fires, the spokesperson of the National Disaster Management Directorate (OKF) informed MTI.
Lieutenant Colonel Dániel Mukics wrote in his announcement that in 2022, there were 228, 3 percent more apartment fires than in 2021. During the year, 102,000 square meters of built-up area burned down, 19 percent less than a year earlier.
92 people lost their lives in apartment fires, six more than the previous year, i.e. the flames took a victim every four days on average; 635 people were injured, 8 percent more than a year earlier, most of them due to smoke inhalation.
14,636 fire trucks were called to put out the apartment fires, and they needed a total of 4,974 hours to put them out. The longest intervention lasted thirteen hours: in April, a fire broke out in the garage of a condominium in Pécs, and the flames spread to the apartments above the garage.
The spokesperson also announced that a fire investigation was launched after 327 apartment fires. The most common causes of fires were the use of an open flame, an electrical problem, a fault in the heating system, cooking, or smoking, but 158 homes – 13 percent less than the previous year – were caused by deliberate arson. Dániel Mukics added: in 512 cases, a fire started in one of the apartments of a panel house.
The fire started from the chimney 967 times; In 352 buildings that caught fire, gas bottles made extinguishing difficult.
Only 19 of the 7,414 homes affected by the fire had smoke detectors, even though these devices reliably signal in the initial phase of the fire when there is still time to act, to extinguish the fire that has just started or to escape and call the fire brigade, he added.
According to the spokesperson, in 2022 the fire department was called 1,234 times due to carbon monoxide, 197 more than a year earlier, and the 19 percent increase in the number of cases is clearly due to the fact that more and more homes have carbon monoxide detectors.
Thanks to the spread of sensors, the number of poisonings decreased by 21 percent; 205 people suffered some degree of carbon monoxide poisoning and 19 people lost their lives last year due to the poisonous gas, wrote Dániel Mukics.
He reminded me: carbon monoxide is created when there is an open flame indoors and the fire does not get enough air. Any heating device and water heater that has a visible, accessible combustion area can be a source of such gas.
In order to avoid tragedies, it is necessary to ensure constant and automatic ventilation, and it is also worth getting a carbon monoxide detector – pointed out the OKF spokesperson.
MTI / Szegedi Nap
Main picture: Yvette Frank
