We will provide initial estimates of overall U.S. and global fire tolls from smoking. We tabulated and summarized smoking-related fire and disaster tolls from published documents. We compared those tolls to U.S. fire, burn, and fire death rates per billion cigarettes extrapolated globally. Cigarette plus cigarette lights fire tolls were multiplied times published and estimated fire costs. Smoking is the leading cause of residential or total fire death in all eight countries with available statistics.
Smoking is a leading cause of fires in many more countries.
Cigarettes cause numerous fire disasters. Cigarette lights cause an estimated 100,000 U.S. and one million global, child-playing fires per year. Cigarette lights fire injuries likely rival U.S., and possibly global, cigarette fire injury numbers. Smoking likely causes large global fire tolls. U.S. fire tolls have fallen when smoking decreased.