
Editor's Note
Back in 2002, as part of my engineering degree, I interned at the Regional Fire Department for the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan. As part of my duties, I organized years of statistics in dusty archives. When I compiled them in a simple excel graph, I was startled: the number of fires and the number of casualties increased dramatically between 1991 and 1992, with elderly hit the hardest. Something extremely significant had happened, something that fundamentally altered fire dynamics in the republic.