It’s a well-known cliche often raised in debates about seat beats, motorcycle helmets or other public-policy inconveniences government wants to impose on residents: “If it saves even one life, it will be worth it.”

It’s not the sharpest of debate tools, and it usually indicates that the person who uses it may be running low on rhetorical ammunition.

Happily, however, we can report an instance where that cliche is justified, where a lot of lives have, in fact, been saved, and the results have been worth the added cost and inconvenience.

We refer to the best public safety news we’ve heard lately – that deaths caused by accidental fires in New Hampshire dropped to a record low in 2013.

Four people died in accidental fires last year, and three of those were residential. That’s still too many, of course, and nobody’s going to declare victory in a battle that requires constant vigilance, but those numbers are much lower than the state typically sees in a year’s worth of fires. The previous low was seven such deaths, in 1999, and it was not unusual for the number to be three times that high in a lot of years, according to State Fire Marshal Bill Degnan.

Over the last 40 years, Degnan said, “I’ve seen a lot of 26s, 21s, 23s and 20s (recorded) each year.”

There are several factors contributing to an improvement in the state’s fire fatality numbers.

The national “change your clock, change your battery” campaign deserves some credit for keeping fresh batteries in smoke detectors by encouraging the public to put in new ones in the spring and fall, when people move their clocks ahead and back. Even better, building codes that require smoke detectors to be hard-wired into each floor of a structure have eliminated the need for batteries altogether.

Fire authorities hear the success stories. “It’s to nice to hear that smoke alarms alerted people and they were able to get out, or that sprinklers stopped a fire before it got serious. Fire prevention education saves lives, pain and suffering – and dollars,” Degnan said.

The best stories, though, are the ones that never get told. The adoption of a 2007 law requiring all cigarettes sold in the state to be self-extinguishing is widely credited with keeping fire deaths down.

“That doesn’t prevent all smoking-related fires,” Degnan said, “but it does reduce the number caused by people falling asleep while smoking or materials smoldering in furniture.”

Firefighters in the state respond to an average 130,000 calls in a typical year, the fire marshal said, and about 4,500 of those are of the moderate-to-serious variety. They cause about $30 million in property damage.

While fire authorities continue their efforts to bring those numbers down by stressing prevention, residents in the state should take a moment to acknowledge that the fire policies we have adopted over the past several years are paying off.

While a lot of smokers bemoaned the inconvenience of the self-extinguishing cigarettes, the low number of fire fatalities make it clear that the change was worth it.

There may be no way to tell for certain exactly how many lives have been saved, but history suggests the number is considerably higher than one.

Whatever it might be, the trend is one that should allow the entire Granite State to sleep a little sounder at night.

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