Fire Prevention Week is here and this year's theme is smoke alarms. Quesnel Fire Department's fire prevention officer, Kirby Booker, talked to The Observer about the importance of these life-saving devices.
Booker said while smoke alarms use different methods of detecting smoke, the best alarm is the one that's working and in your home.
"That means it has batteries in it or it's wired into your electrical. And you check ideally every month," she said. "They're kind of the biggest thing you can do for home fire safety."
Booker said smoke alarms have been the theme for fire prevention week a handful of times over the years and it's no surprise to her because of how important they are.
"Three out of five fire fatalities in North America are in homes with either no smoke alarms or no working smoke alarms," she said. She said it's important that people don't simply take the batteries out of an alarm if they deem it to be a nuisance, saying it happens often where people will take their alarm down because it has gone off due to being placed too close to bathrooms or kitchens. "It's the simplest thing you can do to make your house fire safe."
There are smoke alarms created for people who are hard of hearing or have other disabilities that may affect their ability to notice a standard alarm going off.
"There's strobe lights, there's different frequencies of sounds for people (with) hearing loss. You can even get ones that sort of will shake under your pillow or your bed to wake you up if you aren't going to hear or see it," she said. "Most new buildings, like all the new schools in town, have multiple alarming systems. So traditional bells, they have strobe lights and they often have an audio system of a voice saying 'fire.'"
Booker said it is recommended to have them on ceilings or high on walls because smoke rises, to test them each month with the test button, replace them every 10 years and read the booklet that comes with them. She said the alarms have different beeps for different purposes including low battery and end of service beeps.
"The recommendation now is to have them outside of every sleeping room, inside every bedroom as well and in hallways," she said and added another one 20 to 25 feet of the kitchen is also recommended. "If you have a smoke alarm and it's giving you lots of nuisance alarms, you can give us (the fire department) a call and get a recommendation or you can just go to the store and read on the package and try a different kind." She said because different systems have different ways of detecting smoke, a different alarm may prevent nuisance alarms.
She stressed that having working alarms is essential to safety.
"Most fatal fires do start at night and smoke is not going to wake a person up. It often puts them more to sleep," she said.
Booker also gave a brief history on Fire Prevention Week, saying it started over 100 years ago after the Great Chicago Fire, which started on Oct. 8, 1871.
She compared Chicago at the time to Barkerville on a massive-scale, with wooden sidewalks linking each building together making the spread of the fire much easier. Over 250 people died, hundreds were left displaced and over 17,000 structures were burnt in the blaze.
