Smoke from a Fire is Sneaky – Teaching the Rest of the Smoke Alarm Story

By Meri-K Appy
October 2004

Throughout October, public safety educators like you will be even busier than usual, teaching fire safety lessons to people of every age in the community. Whether for Fire Prevention Week or all during Fire Safety Month, paying special heed to the problem of home fires is more than good community PR. It’s essential to public safety.

The Home Safety Council’s State of Home Safety in America Report™ identifies fire and burn injuries as the third-leading cause of home injury death in the United States. For children 1-14 years old, the largest number of fatalities at home were due to fires and burns. Nearly 90 percent of all fatalities due to a burn or inhalation injury are associated with residential fires. Sadly, each year on average, 3,402 people die as a result of a fire or burn injury in the home. As you well know, the great majority of these deaths are preventable and that’s why community safety education is so critical.

If you will be focusing your October fire safety campaign around the importance of having working smoke alarms, consider enhancing the delivery of your messages by helping your audience understand why fire is so dangerous.

Fire safety educators know that smoke inhalation kills more people in fires than burn injuries, but the public typically does not. More problematic is that the public often does not appreciate why or how smoke from a fire kills.

When you explain the dangers of smoke inhalation you provide your audience with a context for having smoke alarms. Keep it simple so that more people in your community will benefit from the information. Here’s how the Council describes why smoke is so deadly:

• Smoke from a fire is sneaky.
• If a home fire breaks out while we are sleeping, we will not hear the smoke.
• A sleeping person can’t hear the poisons pushing the clean air out of the rooms.
• Smoke will grow and spread, getting hotter and hotter.
• If smoke reaches our beds while we sleep it will fill our lungs with poisonous gases – all without making a sound.
• Without warning smoke can take our lives.

Once your audience understands more about the dangers of smoke, they can better appreciate the value of early warning – working smoke alarms. Here’s what every family in your community needs:

• Working smoke alarms installed on each level of the home.
• Additional smoke alarms inside the rooms where people sleep.

The Home Safety Council recommends hard-wired and interconnected smoke alarms – those that are powered by household electricity and tied in together so that if one alarm signals they all signal, no matter where the fire is detected.

Because the majority of fire deaths occur at home, people in your community have the option and the ability to make changes that will help them and their families stay safer. We believe that when people have the right information at hand, they will make sound choices about their safety.

Free Fire Safety Materials from Home Safety Council

Fire Safety Month is the ideal time to help people in your community better understand both their risk from fire and smoke and the ways they can increase their safety at home. Members of the Expert Network will want to use the Wisconsin Alliance for Fire Safety’s free educational video A Burning Issue: Is Your Family Safe? and its companion lesson plans for presentations to older youth and adults. The Council also provides many free downloadable fire safety materials to use in your Fire Safety Month campaign, including these examples:

Information on Fires and Burns
Safety Huddle on Fire Safety
Step-by-Step Fire Escape Planning
All Home Fire Safety Information in HSC Safety Guide
Join the Expert Network and Receive the Free Video

For the ultimate fire protection, nothing compares to automatic home fire sprinkler systems, which put water directly on the flames in the early stages of fire, slowing the spread of deadly smoke and heat. HSC urges fire departments to include information about the availability of home fire sprinkler systems in community outreach efforts targeted to adults. Free home fire sprinkler presentation materials are featured this month on the Expert Network Downloads Page.