Fire Safety Tips

You’ll be shocked to find this out: How fast can a room burn down?

Did you know it only takes 2 minutes (watch) to 3 minutes (watch) for an entire room to burn down? See for yourself, every second counts!

You’re probably wondering…

“What can I do to prevent this from happening to me?”

Well here are 5 fire safety tips to start with:

1. Don’t leave burning candles unattended if you have pets and kids around.
2. Make sure that before leaving the room, garage, upstairs or downstairs that you blow out the candle.
3. Don’t leave glasses on the table when the sunlight can use them as a lens, and make a piece of paper catch fire (perhaps the one that you just used with nail polish remover)
4. Turn off coffee machine after you’re done making coffee
5. Don’t leave electric blankets plugged in.  Check if they have a thermostat, and add a plug-in timer in case you forget to unplug them. It’s so easy to forget, and it’s enough to forget once in 1000 times; don’t think it can never happen to you!

Be prepared by making sure you are equipped with the following fire safety items in case of fire:

• smoke detectors, interconnected, if possible, for multiple floor homes

• carbon monoxide detector

• fire extinguisher

• fire ladder

• fire blanket

 

Make sure that you and and everyone in your family always know where these items are. Believe me when I say this: in case of fire people can experience shock, get stressed out, and may not think clearly.

Imagine if there is a fire in your house at night. Isn’t it better to be prepared and know the drill instead of scrambling to find the fire ladder in a situation where every second is critical?

We talked about rooms – how about the entire house?

A house can burn down entirely in 15-30 minutes (time-lapse video).

There are also worst scenario cases. If the fire has already started and a room is getting on fire, just get out of the house as fast as you can.

Don’t run, you don’t want to trip and get hurt, falling on the floor during a fire. As Fire Chief Bob Kissner says: “today’s house fires burn eight  (8) times faster and produce 200 times the amount of smoke that a fire would have 50 years ago.”

Here is some good advice for you:

1. If you have a fire in your house DON’T GO looking for items. BE PROACTIVE: buy a fire safety box and put your important documents in it. You can keep it in the basement or cold room (see post, top 10, links). EVACUATE QUICKLY.

2. IF YOU HAVE PETS make sure you purchase the stickers to put on your front door or window alerting firefighters that you have pets and how many. In case of a fire you have to get yourself and your family out first.

Make sure to put documentation of importance regarding your pet (vaccine records, microchip information, etc) in the fire safety box. I will talk about this in more details in another post.