Providence Fire Marshal Anthony DiGiulio looks over a foreclosed and abandoned building on Veazie Street damaged by arson fires.

JOURNAL FILES / Andrew Dickerman

At 10:40 p.m. on April 27, a blaze at the beige Victorian house at 19 Nye St. in New Bedford, Mass., lit up a neighborhood littered with boarded-up homes on the north side. The fire left charred wood and melted vinyl siding on the three-story structure.

The house had been abandoned after the owner defaulted on a $240,000 home loan from GreenPoint Mortgage Funding, a Novato, Calif., lender that shut down last August. The fire was one of four suspicious blazes in foreclosed properties that month in the city. All are under investigation.

The biggest surge of mortgage defaults in seven decades coincides with an increase in blazes in foreclosed properties led by states with the most repossessed homes, according to fire safety officials in Nevada, Massachusetts and Ohio.

“The more empty houses we have, the more fires we are going to see,” said James Wright, chief of the Nevada State Fire Marshal Division in Carson City, the state’s capital. “It’s particularly dangerous for firefighters, because they don’t know what condition these buildings are in or what they might find in them.”

National arson statistics for last year, due in September or October, probably will show a significant increase as foreclosures climbed toward an all-time high in this year’s first quarter, said James Quiggle, a spokesman for the Washington-based Coalition Against Insurance Fraud.

“Home arsons follow foreclosure trends, with a lag,” Quiggle said, pointing to an increase after the last housing slump when the number of blazes reached 116,600 in 1992 from 111,900 in 1990. “We’re facing a potential spike in arson like we’ve never seen before.”

The most recent national data are from 2006, when the median price of a U.S. house reached an all-time high of $221,900, as measured by the National Association of Realtors. There were 31,000 arsons that year, compared with 31,500 in 2005, according to the U.S. Fire Administration in Emmitsburg, Md.

In Providence, after real estate values sagged in the late 1980s, the number of arson fires increased over the ensuing few years by about 27 percent, according to Fire Department data.

There were 245 arson fires in 1989 and, by the end of 1992, the annual figure was up to 310, or a difference of about 27 percent. There is always a lag between the time that the foreclosure process begins, a vacancy or outright abandonment occurs, and a fire breaks out, officials said.

“Before you know it, the copper piping is getting stripped out, the fixtures, the boiler gets taken out,” and then a fire occurs, Providence Fire Marshal Anthony DiGiulio said.

So far this year, according to DiGiulio, there is no evidence of an upsurge in arson fires in buildings due to the higher number of foreclosures. But the threat is clear, officials contend.

Now that mortgage foreclosures are rising fast, Fire Department leaders are worried that the phenomenon will repeat itself. Mayor David N. Cicilline has called the foreclosure situation a crisis that is damaging Providence’s economy.

Profit usually is not the motive when foreclosed properties burn, Quiggle said. Cases such as Sheryl Christman, 38, sentenced in February to five years probation for torching her Caledonia, Mich., home four days before it was repossessed are the “exception, not the rule,” Quiggle said.

Insurance pays the replacement cost, which rarely covers the mortgage of a property in foreclosure, he said. The value of the land is not covered.

“It takes a lot of chutzpah to set fire to a house when you’re the policyholder and would be first on any suspect list,” Quiggle said. “It doesn’t take much for a squatter to knock over a candle or for some kids to set a fire when a building is vacant.”

Last year, fires in vacant Nevada buildings increased 4 percent from a year earlier, said Wright, the fire marshal, and that number may grow, he said. The state had the worst foreclosure rate in the United States during the first quarter, with one filing for every 54 households, according to data compiled by RealtyTrac Inc. The national rate was one filing per 194 households, analysts at the Irvine, Calif., company said.

In Ohio, where one of every 161 households had a foreclosure filing during the first quarter, the number of blazes in vacant buildings rose 18 percent in 2006, according to the latest figures compiled by Ohio’s Division of State Fire Marshal in Reynoldsburg.

Damages climbed 52 percent to $22.7 million from a year earlier in the state where house sales began tumbling in 2004’s second half, a year before the national decline began.

The value of houses owned by U.S. banks more than doubled to $8.6 billion in the first quarter of this year from $3.59 billion a year earlier as lenders repossessed homes in default, data compiled by Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in Washington show.

“Empty buildings have more fires and more serious fires than occupied buildings,” said Steven Westermann, president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs in Fairfax, Va. “There’s no one around to sound an alarm.”

Nationally, there were 396,000 house fires of all types reported in 2006, the highest in 10 years, according to the latest data available from the National Fire Protection Association in Quincy, Mass. They caused a record $6.83 billion of damage.

Almost two-thirds of fires that occur in unsecured vacant buildings are set, said John Hall, head of research at the National Fire Protection Association. The rate drops to 32 percent in empty buildings protected with locks or boarded windows and 7 percent in occupied homes, he said.

In New Bedford, where the Nye Street house was boarded up, the city has posted signs on the charred building that read: “Reward of up to $5,000 if you know who did this.” So far, there are no leads.

The house has been empty since the subprime mortgage defaulted last August, the same month the lender, GreenPoint Mortgage, went out of business after selling the loan to investors in a mortgage-backed security called BS ABS 2004-AC5 2300, according to documents at the Bristol County Registry of Deeds.

“For every foreclosure, you have more empty homes and more people who may become homeless,” said Hall, of the National Fire Protection Association. “These properties are on the fringe of society’s attention.”

The growing number of vacant buildings, however, has not escaped the attention of firefighting officials. Flint, Mich., put out a June 2007 study that called vacant-building fires “a dangerous exercise in futility.” Blazes in empty structures such as foreclosed homes account for 40 percent of the city’s fires and 62 percent of its firefighter injuries, Fire Captain Andy Graves said in the report.

Nationally, there are 3.7 firefighter injuries per 100 blazes in vacant buildings, compared with 1.9 injuries per 100 fires overall, Graves said in the report.

“We lose a lot of firefighters in vacant structures,” said Westermann of the International Association of Fire Chiefs.

With Journal staff reports