Firefighter arson a long-standing issue – expert
firerescue1.com
firerescue1.com
There’s roughly 100 firefighter arsonists convicted every year in North America and all of them are serial arsonists, which means three or more fires,” Nordskog told CBC.
According to Nordskog, firefighter arsonists tend to be young males who recently joined the fire service, who may become bored, desire recognition and struggle with anger or frustration.
All things considered, it’s probably a smaller percentage vs. doctors doing un-doctor things, cops, etc.
eg: earlier this month https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-03/perth-paediatrician-c...
Still, if you want to split hairs on various cases, there are the Dr Shipman's straight up killing patients, medical practitioners (nurses and doctors) with Angel of Mercy tendencies, and more than one surgeon with a cutting fetish, eg:
Top amputation surgeon had his own legs removed due to a fetish. Were his patients safe? - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/01/neil-hopper-...
So, the number '100', has to wildly low, as some arsonists will not have been caught, or only started one or two fires.
There's roughly 200 doctors convicted every year in the U.S. alone of criminal 'patient abuse or neglect', for data compiled between 1988 and 2026 [1]. While I'd prefer to cite the 'patient abuse' figure since 'patient harmer' is the most equivalent behavior to 'firefighter arsonist' (both cause the problem they treat), I think it's worth remembering that human beings — regardless of their profession — have a slim but non-zero chance of deciding to create problems that give them professional satisfaction to solve.
[1] https://plaindiscipline.com/action-type/conviction-patient-a... —
Ahh right, my homelab.
(This could be nitpicked somewhat around not having added wording for e.g. 'test labs', 'staging', etc. The core issue equivalence is the criminal intent, not the simple fact that a problem is created.)
It does make me wonder if we would see similar things in the software industry if it had a similar heroism attached.
It's as it should be: fires are fairly random, so if firefighters are always busy fighting fires, then they aren't available if another fire breaks out.
I believe the calculation is that fire fighters should only be fighting fires 10% of the time to ensure that there are almost always fighters available.
Lots of other professions should not be always busy for the same reason: doctors, nurses, police, secretaries etc. The main reason why quarantines were continued so long in my country is because hospitals were at 110% before COVID and COVID was causing significant nurse burnout.
That deliberate idling of fire fighters might explain why they are more likely to create work for themselves than doctors or SRE's
It says "in North America", so I assume that's across US and Canada. There are 1.2 million firefighters in the US, and about 150k in Canada, so let's call it 1.3 million. 100 out of 1.3 million is statistically irrelevant.
How's that stack up against the general public? That'd be good to know, but the article doesn't touch on it. The latest data i can find is for the US in 2024, where there were 65,795 arson convictions. There are 349 million people in the US, so the number of arsonists is 0.0001% of the general population. The number of firefighters that are arsonists (100/65,795) is 0.0015%, so I suppose it's slightly higher that the general population.
All this should have been in the article.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fires-set-by-firefig...
The article refers to a report that 404s.
Both the OPs post and the CBC article say records aren't detailed for this so unless theres some studies (lol funding in current political era) you prob will never have real percents.
But i think its fair to say yea firefighters are more likely to be arsonists i guess.
Firesetting Firefighters: Reconsidering a Persistent Problem--Firefighter Arson Research
~ https://www.academia.edu/1052901/Firesetting_Firefighters_Re...
National Volunteer Fire Council - Report on the Firefighter Arson Problem: Contexts, Considerations, and Best Practices
~ https://www.academia.edu/1052842/National_Volunteer_Fire_Cou...
Firefighter Arson Prevention & Recovery Toolkit - NVFC
~ https://www.academia.edu/3258256/Firefighter_Arson_Preventio...
Trying to imagine being really into math and seeing one number that’s fifteen times bigger than another number and posting “that’s slightly higher”
You comparing arsonists/pop with firefighter-arsonists/arsonists. That’s the wrong comparison. You should be comparing arsonists/pop with firefighter-arsonists/firefighters. Or firefighters/pop with firefighter-arsonists/arsonists.
(On top of that, mixing numbers from different sources can be problematic. For example, how are repeat convictions treated in the different sources? Who counts as a firefighter?)
2019 was an American right wing/Facebook/Twitter job to downplay climate change and instead push the narrative that it was all done by arsonists
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-08/fires-misinformation-...
He said the topic appeared to be attracting a "suspiciously high number of bot-like and troll-like accounts".
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Sad to see that American narrative about Australia still being spread
I'm trying to figure out what pathology I'm hiding as a software engineer.
Experts create the worst problems and when experts bring the help desk those worst problems, sometimes the reply must be "You caused it, you fix it; or, we can restore your device to an IT-supported state after you backup whatever data you don't want to lose". So, what problems have you created that require you to engineer solutions for them? Did you create those problems intentionally? A lot of us do so in our 'home lab environments', and that's what they're for. But doing so intentionally at work — not accidentally — is called 'making work for yourself so you get paid by someone to fix problems you created', and that is a perfect match for 'firefighter arsonist'.
(None of this is accusation, this is just analogy-building; both 'software' and 'you' are swappably generics for any profession and any engineer, respectively.)
The software engineering job skips dealing directly emotional regulation, experiencing emotions and directly confronting others in vulnerable way or a negative way like boundaries.
Instead you are given a problem, and you can fix the problem, control the variables and see if your solution works logically and tangibly.
You cannot do this with people interactions. Emotional orbits, feelings, insecurities, needs, wants are messy overlap .. are not easily definable , and flux … software engineers may not thrive here I would guess.
Police who seed crime? (Surely.)
Developers who insert bugs?
I knew it was the developers!
My theory is that there is at least one serial killer that is a life insurance agent or someone that can see all the new policies
Kind of like Robin Hood but slightly crazier I go around murdering people who have just taken out policies to help out their beneficiaries.
Its one of the most unscrupulous sales person industries there is, if not the most based on how tightly (but inadequately) regulated it is
Its just a cesspool of chasing leads and commissions from people that don’t actually need what the salesperson is selling
and the motive would be unrelated to life insurance, just taking advantage of a gap in the justice system, a sure fire way to get away with it and frame someone
Car mechanics who break things so you come back for more business?
Airline pilots who... hijack their own flight?... Hm
Seems like a set of people that suddenly made themselves really useful.
...
You can also look at lots of events that trigger wars where the side looking to get into the war seems to have a very convenient tragic even to validate their entry into a war.
Or situations where people make other dependent on them so they can constantly save them from not being able to be independent.
Or people who like to pick fights try to make it so someone will do something that will unwittingly offend them.
The world is full of setups, many subconsciously created, so that one person can be the hero or main character in their own narrative.
Heck we even do it to ourselves when we procrastinate so much that we have to save ourselves with Herculean effort to get something done on time.
Maybe we can also ask why women don't join to fight fires and there's 10% or less participation. Compared to police forces globally there's under 10% female firefighters but around 30% female police officers, so it's not as simple as "it's dangerous and women are afraid".
Having 1 in 10,000 of them convicted of arson each year is a wild statistic.
You forgot to multiply by 100.
You forgot to multiply by the number of firefighters around you. There is more than one firefighter working in your city or state.
More sobering thought: conviction rates are typically a small percentage of the people who do the foul deed. The definition of "arsonist", for example. What if someone started "just one" fire?
A more sobering thought: of the total fires fought each year, how many are started by those rogue firefighters?
A most sobering thought: why is it that there is so much fallow time, that they get bored?
OK, so why should I care? A brief Google shows the population of North America at ~600 million people. And the number of firefighters in North America at ~1.3 million. So your likelihood of being victimized by a serial firefighter arsonist is about the same as being struck by lightning, dying in a plane crash, or being killed by a falling coconut.
If they did so in concert with building code inspectors beforehand to try out various new things, had the 'what were the circumstances leading to this fire?' fire drill conditions sealed in an envelope, and won a pizza party if the arson investigators guessed incorrectly on whether those circumstances were or were not arson — then I think that firefighters might have much less cause for arson. Certainly having done IT for fucking ever, I can come up with some extraordinarily evil things to do, but my industry has 'red teams' and 'onsite penetration tests' because we understand the need for this. TREX apparently conducts 1-2 burns per year as a big serious training event, which is nice — but that's so few and so many fires are so boring and there probably aren't enough TREX burns to meet demand for live fire exercises. And, yes, I wish my own hometown's firefighters would build a structure every month and then burn it to the ground and then try to defeat the arson investigators. This can only reduce the chances of firefighter arson, and no amount of 'firing blanks' exercises are going to have a serious impact on this issue. And, introducing a competitive aspect creates a professional 'hero' outcome for the firefighters who manage to defeat the arson inspectors — they're not only now a hero among their fire industry peers, they're also a hero for the lives that will be saved by future arson investigations solved by their own fire drill arson. Sure, this isn't 'hot neighbor' adulation as many U.S. young men might dream of — but it's peer adulation, and I suspect their dreams would have little difficulty adapting.