Fire Prevention and Public Education

I'm relatively new to Firefighter Nation, but I'm noticing an unfortunate trend--this site seems to be geared toward the "fun" aspects of firefighting, i.e. structural firefighting, vehicular rescue and the like. It makes me wonder what the main thrust of Firefighter Nation is supposed to be; is it a training and informational resource, or is it a firefighters' MySpace, existing only for storytelling and socializing? Time will tell, but I'd like to get a discussion going on prevention and public education in rural communities. Does your volunteer department provide fire prevention and education services? If so, how? Does it impact your emergency response capability at all?

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Permalink Reply by Jenny Holderby on December 1, 2008 at 2:43am

A senior citizen center is a good place to present fire prevention programs and at community centers even if they only allow you to leave literature. Getting brochures on smoke detectors, co2 detectors, planning escape routes and electrical safety do contribute to fire safety. Often seeing the brochure will make someone think about hazards in their own home.

I really don't know about anywhere else but in our area more people are using the chimney cleaning logs or other products making chimney fires rare. We see a lot of gas burning logs where the jets are gummed up causing it to smoke or set off carbon monoxide alarms. Space heaters as a whole are much safer these days than say 20 years ago.
As I said, as technology progresses so does safety. But you can't always cancel out the stupidity factor. No matter how safe a product or applicance is, someone will use them in a not recommended manner occassionally. As I always say: "You can't stop stupid, its gonna happen."

Last winter the price of kerosene made folks choose another heating source.
My department did respond to a couple of fires caused by space heaters One occupant had left her mobile home because the pipes were frozen but left an electric space heater on. In another fire a couple of weeks later we were unable to rescue two small children. The space heater either shorted out causing an electrical fire or something fell on it. I didn't see the final report. We hadn't seen that type of fire in a while but we also had colder tempertures for a longer period than we had experienced in several years as well. Here is our socio/economics again.

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Permalink Reply by Mitchell Fire Company on December 1, 2008 at 10:09am

Space heaters are safer, but I'm taking bets now on whether or not users are safer, lol. We went to our first chimney fire of the season last night (which unfortunately was a chimney/attic fire by the time we arrived on scene), and I overheard the owners saying something to the effect that they wondered if they should have had it checked before a fire. Again, it's a case of inattentiveness and lack of pub ed access. One thing I've been doing lately to get the word out on heating safety is leaving literature in homes when we go on medical calls. Is it a dirty trick? Maybe, but eight out of ten times, we're in someone's house for a medical call. I'm trying to maximize the time we have with that family, and if they see me out in public they think, "Oh, there's that screwball who gave us a heating safety brochure when Aunt Pootie had her heart attack," then at least they're thinking about it. Hopefully they read the material, too.