The National Fire Agency said on the 26th it will overhaul the fire investigation classification system to fit the changed disaster environment. It is the first time in 19 years since the 2005 enactment of the Fire Investigation and Reporting Regulations.
The current fire investigation classification system is tailored to relatively simple ignition types of the past, such as cigarettes, gas, and electrical short circuits. That is why fires involving new business types and new technologies that have surged recently—such as lithium-ion batteries, unmanned shops, and shared mobility charging facilities—are collectively tallied simply as "electrical factors."
The National Fire Agency began the overhaul, judging that without classification codes there can be no accurate statistics, and without statistics there can be no effective policies.
The "fire investigation classification system improvement task force (TF) team" decided to develop a fire statistics model suited to Korea, based on the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) method of subdividing fires by accident type and the Fire and Disaster Management Agency (FDMA) of Japan's composite classification system that links four elements (ignition factor, ignition location, and first material ignited) around the heat source.
It also plans to establish new fire classification codes related to new industrial sectors that have emerged since the 2000s, such as electric vehicles, large-scale energy storage systems (ESS), and unmanned shops.
Work to upgrade the National Fire Data System (NFDS) will proceed in parallel. Data such as building registry records, vehicle registrations, and weather information, which fire investigators previously entered by hand, will be automatically linked. The system will be expanded to include artificial intelligence (AI)-based statistical analysis and risk prediction.
The TF team plans to finalize the reform plan by broadly gathering input from field experts and academia, and then move to amend related laws and regulations.