What a dryer fire costs in Las Vegas

The damage, and how the average is built

Every fire department in the country files an incident report with the federal government, and the form has a field for the equipment that started the fire. Filter five years of those reports down to one equipment code and one county and you get the numbers on this page. Nobody publishes this cut, so it is written out here in full.

The average is $2,158,145 divided by all 122 fires. Forty-one of those recorded no dollar loss at all, which is normal for a fire caught early and put out with an extinguisher. Counting only the 81 that did record a loss, the average is $26,644.

The largest single fire in the five years took $370,000 out of a one or two family home on 2024-01-11.

The count barely moves year to year. The damage swings by a factor of eight, because a handful of fires that reach the structure carry almost all of it.

Where they happen

Houses and apartments, overwhelmingly. The rest is the part of the list people do not expect: a casino, a hospital, a church, a hotel, and eight in commercial laundries and dry cleaners, where the machines run all day.

One in four is a multi-unit building, which is a different problem from a house. Shared and stacked duct runs are longer, they are nobody's personal responsibility, and the first sign is usually a tenant complaining the dryer is slow. What that involves for a property manager or an HOA board is on its own page.

Inside the building, 104 of the 122 started in the laundry area itself and 7 started in a garage or carport, which in this valley is where a lot of dryers live.

When they happen

July and August are the quietest months of the year, with 6 fires between them out of 122. November through February holds 51. That is the reverse of the intuition in a place where summer is the dangerous season for everything else, and the likely reason is mundane: the dryer works hardest when the air is cold and nothing dries on its own.

April at 17 is the highest single month and nothing in the data explains it. With 122 fires spread over 60 months, one busy month is inside the range of coincidence, and it is left here unexplained rather than given a reason it has not earned.

What starts them

Ninety-two of the 122 are recorded as unintentional, 29 as a failure of the equipment or the heat source, one as undetermined. None were deliberate.

The form has a second field for what contributed, and it is where the useful answer would be, except that it is optional and mostly blank. Of the roughly 30 fires where anybody filled it in, the two most common entries are mechanical failure or malfunction, 10 fires, and failure to clean, 9 fires. Ninety are blank or marked none, so treat those two figures as the shape of the answer rather than the size of it.

That is the honest version of a claim this industry usually makes with a much bigger number attached. The signs that a vent is restricted are a better guide to your own risk than any of this, because they describe the machine in front of you.

Every number here is a floor, and the reason is worth seeing

The equipment field is optional. Most fire reports leave it blank, and departments in the same valley leave it blank at very different rates.

So 97 of the 122 fires on this page come from Clark County Fire Department and 2 come from Las Vegas Fire and Rescue, which filed 2,786 fire reports over the same five years. That gap is paperwork, not safety. A dryer fire inside the city limits is roughly as likely as one a mile away in the county, and it is far less likely to be written down as a dryer fire.

The federal agency that publishes the data says the same thing in general terms: these records are voluntary and are not a count of every fire. The real number of dryer fires in this valley is higher than 122. How much higher is not knowable from this data, and no honest version of this page can tell you.

How it sits against everything else that burns

The same departments filed 12,694 structure fire reports over the same five years, so dryers account for about 1 percent of them. It is not a leading cause of anything. It is a preventable cause with a five-figure average attached, which is a different argument and a more honest one.

Across the state, Nevada recorded 139 of these fires in the same period, so Clark County holds 88 percent of the state total while holding roughly 73 percent of its people. Part of that is real, since a county with more apartments and longer duct runs should have more of them. Part of it is the coding rates above. The two cannot be separated with this data.