Area students learned all about the importance of maintaining smoke alarms as part of fire prevention, thanks to educational presentations given by members of the Danville Fire Department, according to Tim McFadden, fire inspector for the City of Danville.
Students from Northeast Magnet School participated in a tour of a firehouse in Danville, McFadden said — tours which other schools will also participate in through the next week, he said.
“They came back to the firehouse this year for the first time in a few years,” McFadden said. “We got to give them a station tour and go through the different rooms of our house and give them safety tips.”
As they walked through different rooms of the firehouse, they learn about about staying safe while cooking, ways to avoid getting burned or scalded in the kitchen, and about what happens when a smoke alarm goes off.
“If you’re sleeping, you stay low and you crawl up… You get everybody outside, just like they do at school. Teach them how to call 9-1-1. We make sure they know their address, so if they do need to call for help, they know how to get people there.”
The tours are part of their larger fire prevention strategy for Illinois’ Fire Prevention Week, which runs from October 6-12 each year.
“It’s a good time for us to get the kids to come out and have a good time. We also have a little obstacle course that we set up here in our lawn. It’s, it’s kind of simulates, some firefighter activities, so they get a little bit of a taste of what it’s like to be a firefighter and interact with them,” McFadden said.
The experience was educational and fun, says McFadden, for both students and firefighters alike.
“It’s fun for them, it’s fun for us. We always look forward to that,” McFadden said.
The theme for this year was “Smoke Alarms: Make Them Work For You.”
“We’re recommending they install smoke alarms in every bedroom or outside each sleeping area, like in a hallway and make sure you have one on each level, including the basement, because that’s a lot of times where your water heater or your furnace are, so we have to make sure it’s not overlooked.”
Another important aspect of fire prevention is to ensure that all family members, especially those with sensory or physical disabilities, are kept aware of fires.
“If you have somebody in your home who’s deaf for instance, they make special smoke alarms with a strobe light that will indicate that the alarm’s going off,” McFadden said. “So make sure you have the alarms that meet the needs of your family.”
McFadden emphasizes the importance of regularly testing smoke alarms at least once a month.
“Set a schedule, maybe the first Saturday of the month or whatever, to check that they respond like they’re supposed to,” McFadden said.
Though in the past, people were encouraged to change their batteries when they changed their clocks twice a year, but nowadays people are encouraged to check the batteries monthly.
“The smoke alarms they are making now have batteries in there that are permanent so you don’t change them. They last, over the life of the of the detector. And that’s usually that’s about 10 years on a good day,” McFadden said, advising people to change their smoke alarms every 10 years, regardless.