Sinistralidade dos Bombeiros no Combate a Incêndios Florestais no Distrito de Santarém

Abstract

The following paper is part of the Final Project of BSc in Work Safety Engineering. After the summer of 2013, during which eight firefighters lost their lives while fighting forest fires in Portugal, it became urgent to evaluate the accident rates of firefighters in this kind of mission. Because there is no known study in this area, it was proposed to the District Relief Operations Command a study of accidents in the District of Santarém, and this proposal was swiftly accepted. The data were collected from the Personal Accident Preliminary Reports, since January 2006 to December 2013, in order to analyse statistically and to assess the most common risks, for subsequent proposal of the measures necessary to their elimination or mitigation. We intended to study the relationship between accidents and the number of occurrences and / or the time the fire happened, as well as between accidents and the average duration of fire, among others. Descriptive results show that the majority of accidents occur in the afternoon, at the fire, being caused by falls, and a large part of these happens when leaving the car. It is also noted that, mostly, these accidents occur in the phase of initial attack to fire. It is also noted that the majority of accidents occur in the age group between 21 and 25 years of age and involving firefighters with 1 to 5 years of effective service.