In the past five years, the municipality of Oss has had the most car fires per inhabitant in Brabant. The chance of a car catching fire here is four times greater than in Alphen-Chaam, where the risk of a car fire is the smallest. This is evident from research by Omroep Brabant.
1. Oss
The number of car fires per inhabitant varies greatly per municipality. In Oss, for example, there was an average of one car fire for every 1696 inhabitants over the past five years. This is largely due to a pyromaniac who was active there in 2018 and 2019. A suspect was never caught. In 2021 there was another pyromaniac who also broke into some cars, someone was arrested for that.
2. Eindhoven
At number two, Eindhoven, the number of car fires was slightly lower, with one fire among every 1717 inhabitants. In five years, the Eindhoven fire brigade responded 694 times to a car fire, the highest number in Brabant.
3. Moerdijk
The municipality of Moerdijk occupies third place, partly due to the A4, A16, A17 and A59 motorways that run through the municipality. It sometimes happens that cars catch fire there due to technical problems.
4. and 5. Boxtel and Den Bosch
The high number of car fires in Boxtel is also striking. For every 1882 inhabitants there has been one response to a car fire. The fact that Den Bosch is high is partly due to the fact that it is a large city, but it leaves Helmond, Tilburg and Breda, for example, well behind with one car fire per 1886 inhabitants.
Slight increase
The number of car fires in Brabant is increasing again after a cautious decrease during the corona pandemic. Fire brigades had to turn out about a thousand times a year to extinguish a vehicle. This is evident from figures from the three security regions in our province.
2018: 977 turnouts
2019: Turn out 1115
2020: Turn out 1126
2021: 968 turn out
2022: Turn out 1082
It is not clear exactly how many cars have gone up in flames. It often happens that several cars are on fire or damaged at the same time. That is not registered per car.
Click on the map for the number of car fires in your municipality.
The smallest chance of a car fire is in Goirle, Baarle-Nassau and Alphen-Chaam. In the latter municipality there was only one car that went up in flames per 7446 inhabitants. Only three municipalities had no car fires at all during a year.
Unclear cause
In the past five years, the Brabant fire brigade had to go to a car fire in our province almost 5300 times and went out 86 times to car fires in other provinces. The fire service does not keep track of the (probable) cause of each car fire.
Incidentally, it is not always easy to determine whether a car has caught fire due to a technical cause or arson, because any traces often literally burn. The police are responsible for investigating possible arson. They keep track of how often this happens, whether suspects are arrested and whether the case is transferred to the Public Prosecution Service.
Only the Brabant police did not want to share that information. “Unfortunately, it is often impossible to sort out all this information. It would require a lot of capacity; it takes a lot of time to extract detailed information from the systems. We only do that in exceptional cases.”
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