Impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on the number of residential fires in Catalonia

Purpose This article analyses how lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic impacted in residential fire numbers in 2020 in Catalonia, Spain, and how their temporal distribution changed throughout the year. The results stand to inform public authorities responsible for emergency prevention and to generate new streams of research on residential fires during the pandemic and beyond. Design/methodology/approach We compared the number of residential fires in 2020 with the number of fires in the two previous years (i.e. 2018 and 2019) and in 2021, both throughout full years and in five subperiods identified by analysing daily residential fire anomalies. We also analysed differences in the number of residential fires on weekdays versus weekends and in four daily time slots. Findings The results show a reduction of more than one-third in the first two weeks of the first lockdown in mid-March 2020 and of more than one-quarter in the first half of the second lockdown in autumn 2020. The pandemic’s positive indirect impact was short-lived, even more so than the reduction in pollutants discharged into the atmosphere and the decrease in the number of traffic accidents and injuries. Originality/value To our knowledge, our study was the first to involve a temporal analysis of the incidence of residential fires in Catalonia as impacted by COVID-19 lockdowns.