This measure reflects the Fire Department's ability to contain fires in single and multifamily residential structures, which is integral to property loss prevention and mitigation. Acccording to the U.S. Fire Administration, "confined structure fires are small fire incidents that are limited in scope, are generally confined to noncombustible containers, rarely result in serious injury or large content losses, and are expected to have no accompanying property losses due to flame damage." The Department reports data on confined fires as part of USFA's National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS), a national reporting system used to encourage the recording of fire incident data in an uniform manner. The current NFIRS version 5.0 includes incident types (#111-123) that are specifically designed to identify confined residential structure fires (property uses #400-464) and minimize the underreporting and unreporting of these fires. The most recent USFA Confined Structure Fires Report (2006) noted that "confined fires accounted for 53% of those residential fires where cause information is available." The Department's goal of 55% is slightly more than this rate and reflects its desire to minimize loss. Achieving low rates of confinement (which may increase the potential for loss) could signal the result of the need for more resources, increased severity in fires, longer responses response times, etc.

Confined Structure Fires relies on data from the fire incident database, NFIRS. The data is retrieved from the Firehouse Records Management system. On the Structure Fire module in the Fire Origin & Spread section there is a look up option with five categories of fire spread. To pull the report go to Reports tab, then under Administrative Reports find "Cynthia-Fire Confined to Rm/Bldg of origin". The Firehouse simply counts the number of residential structure fire incidents that have the Fire Spread option of "Confined to room of origin" selected.