DOHA: Civil Defence authorities remain clueless about the cause of most incidents of fires in the country, official figures released for the last three years at least suggest.
More than a 1,000 (1,026) incidents of fire were reported last year and the authorities failed to discover the cause of a vast majority of them (906).
Last year’s fires claimed at least seven lives and left no less than a hundred people injured, nine of them quite seriously.
Figures released by the national office of statistics, Qatar Statistics Authority (QSA), reflect that the authorities could not pinpoint the cause of 734 of a total of 819 fires that were reported in 2010.
The same is true of 2009 when 848 incidents of fire were reported and it was not clear what caused a vast majority (636) of them.
Electrical short-circuit was a major cause of fire in the case of incidents that were successfully probed and their causes were discovered.
While short-circuit triggered at least 87 incidents of blaze, at least three were caused by leaking cooking gas.
Homes and automobiles are more prone to catching fire than offices and shops, QSA figures reflect. Of the 1,026 incidents reported in 2011, as many as 454 affected homes.
The number of vehicles that caught fire was 194.
Some 416 and 467 homes witnessed fire in 2010 and 2009, respectively. The number of automobiles that caught fire in these years totalled 187 and 166, respectively.
Most fires erupt during the sizzling summer months, and at least last year, a maximum of 124 were reported in a single month — May. The figures were above 100 for June and July as well.
Most deaths (three of the seven) were reported in the month of June of last year, according to QSA figures for 2011.
In the last three years, figures for which are available, no fire was caused by live cigarette butts or due to children messing up in homes or anywhere else.
Educational facilities, government offices, industrial plants, ships and boats, farmhouses and public parks are not immune to fire as some of them were also involved in the incidents last year as also the previous two years.
The Peninsula
