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Thank you very much. Good morning everybody. When Fred asked me would I be prepared to

do a keynote and I said well it's going to be on fire because that's what I'm working

on at the moment, but urban fire. So I'm going to use this opportunity to do a bit of propaganda

in the sense of putting urban fire on the map because urban fire tends to be very much

a forgotten hazard and obviously I want to look at it in terms of both culture and justice

which are the themes of this third conference. I'll talk for about 30 minutes, probably not

longer than that because I wasn't sure how long I had. What do I hope to do? Well, three

things I want to look at. First of all, I actually want to talk a bit about urban fire

and just put it, as I said, put it on the map. It's a major hazard. It's generally overlooked

and I want to know why it's overlooked and of course that is a question of conceptual

injustice I would argue. Secondly, I want to talk about basically the social construction

of fire. Again, most people think of fire as a purely physical event and they don't

consider the social construction of it in the way in which in particular the culture

plays an important role in determining the particular. There are fires, not fire and

it's interesting that in German as there is in Dutch there are different words for the

fire that you light and the fire that burns down a house while English has just the one

word which is conceptually I find quite interesting. Then finally I want to turn and look at the

question of fire justice. Why is it important? Why is justice important in this concept and

how do we incorporate culture and what does culture mean? Which we'll refer back to Megan's

talk a bit but also to the question that Terry asked and Terry is, oh he's moved over there,

which will bring in the concept of culture and the different kinds of cultural conceptions

of justice that we need to consider. First of all, let me talk about urban fire and why

it is a major hazard because I don't think we as disaster risk reduction or disaster

specialists actually give urban fire enough consideration. It accounts for around 300,000

deaths a year. That's a lot of people. It's the fourth largest cause of accidental injury.

Something about 11 million people are burnt severely enough every year to require medical

attention and fire deaths represent 5% of all injury deaths globally in 2004. I thought

to put an equivalent there, the entire cumulative equivalent figures for war is 2%. I'll give

you some idea of the comparative dimension of the problem of fire. Of course for every

fire fatality there are many, many more people who are left with lifelong disabilities and

disfigurements that have extremely severe social and economic consequences, both for

the people who are affected by the fire and of course for their families. There's very,

very little research done outside of this, outside of the Western countries on this at

this point. What are the main causes of urban fire? Well, Alex had Kathmandu up. That's

a picture of Kathmandu. I mean it's a perfect example, but one of the major problems of

urban fire are electrical connections or I should put illegal or hazardous connections

that have been put up by people who are illegally tapping into the grid. The other thing is

that the grid, these hazardous criss-crossing wires are a major cause of urban fire as are

faulty electrical equipment to which the connections are made. I think you had pictures again in

one of your hearts and I noticed it did have fire on it. I'm sorry, it did have electricity

in it, but I was wondering whether it was a legal connection or an illegal connection.

Anyhow, in a lot of cases it's an illegal connection, which means of course it's unregulated

and it's hazardous. Other causes of fire? Well, of course open fire, open lights, open

flames like candles. Candles are often used, particularly in informal settlements. The

project I'm working with people were looking at refugee camps too and of course candles

are used to a very large extent there for lighting. Kerosene stoves, main way of cooking.

Firewood, charcoal, all these things of open flames of course cause enormous amounts of

or enormous causes of fire. Then there is bonfires. These may be ceremonials, but in

more cases it's actually about waste disposal. So people burning waste to get rid of it.