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With the increasing development of underwater equipment, electrical fire has become the focus of safety concern. To effectively guide the fire engineering design and incident management, this research proposes a priority assessment method for the electrical fire risks in typical Chinese underwater equipment cabins, which integrates the fault tree, modified analytic hierarchy process (MAHP), B-RISK fire zone model and Borda number ranking. Firstly, the method uses the fault tree to identify the fire sources (origins) and MAHP involving the numbers of accidents and regulations and the failure rate to quantify the fire occurrence possibility. Secondly, the B-RISK model is used to predict and rank the fire severities induced by fire spread. Finally, a priority ranking of fire risk is achieved using the Borda number combining fire occurrence possibility and fire severity. The case study on a typical underwater power station show that the fire occurrence possibility obtained by MAHP is highly consistent with the result of traditional AHP. The B-RISK simulations can identify the fire spread paths and thus the causes of fire expansion. The rankings of fire occurrence possibility and fire severity do not consistent with each other therefore the Borda number can better evaluate the priority of fire risks which builds the foundations for potential fire engineering assessment and design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]