For much of the past year, NFPA researchers have been working on a gigantic project to collect and analyze the last four decades of residential fire statistics in the United States. While they found that fires and fire deaths have been cut in half since 1980, there are some aspects of the fire problem are actually worse now than 40 years ago. On this podcast, we talk to researcher Birgitte Messerschmidt about the successes, what these numbers tell us about fire in the US, and why some major challenges linger despite our best efforts.   Links: Read the full report: nfpa.org/fireprogress