Power-law distribution of city fires

This paper presents results of fire distributions in China and Switzerland. The frequency-size (loss) distribution and the rank-size distribution (or Zipf plot) of city fires are plotted to check their fit with a power-law relationship. The results indicate that fire data in both countries have good power-law distributions and the power-law relation is invariant with scale and time, i.e. fires in different places or in different periods will have the same distribution characteristics. Steady power-law distribution corresponds with self-organized criticality (SOC) and is expected to provide practical implications for fire protection. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.