NCTSN Consultant Concludes House Fire Research

Studies show that one in every five families will experience a fire in their homes. Someone is injured by fire every 37 seconds and someone is killed by fire every three hours. About 70 percent of these fires are residential, and most could have been prevented. There are currently no long-term systematic programs that we know of to assist children after a fire.

These are sobering statistics, but researchers in the College of Science’s Department of Psychology at Virginia Tech are offering more than a flicker of hope to families whose lives have been affected by house fires.

Russell T. Jones, professor of psychology and consultant to the NCCTS and Category II Terrorism and Disaster Center, and his team have studied the influence of major technological and natural disasters on children’s functioning for the past 26 years. His most recent endeavor was the completion of a $1.2 million National Institutes of Mental Health grant assessing the impact of residential fire on children and their parents.

“Residential fires are unique in that they typically impact one single family,” Jones said. “After the fire trucks are gone and the Red Cross has completed its efforts, families are basically left to fend for themselves. This isolation may lead to even greater levels of psychological distress.”

Jones found in his research that fire emergencies have potentially deleterious consequences on children and their families – consequences that may continue for years after the disaster.

“We interview survivors and assess their level of psychological distress,” Jones said. “The most common pathological outcomes include depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

Most of the children studied reported that a house fire was the most traumatizing event they had ever experienced, and 75 percent of them believed they could do nothing to prevent house fires. That’s where Jones and his clinical team go above and beyond empirical research. Through a program called REACT (Recovery Effort After Child Trauma), they provide assistance to help children and families recover from a fire

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