Fire Safety

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This video (link included in case I can't get this "embed" thing to work, or if you want to look at the original that doesn't have some other organization's URL plastered across it) shows how a room can become lethal to human life in a few seconds. While the video itself is about dry Yule trees, it's also a general reminder to keep your smoke detectors in working order and in place, and to know your escape routes in the event of a fire. If someone had been standing right next to the source with a home fire extinguisher in hand, s/he might have been able to put it out within the first four seconds or so. By the time twenty seconds were up, no person standing in that room could survive: the only thing to do is gather your loved ones and get out.

Incidentally, do you know where your gas and electric shutoffs are? Do you know how to shut them off? If you needed to in a hurry, could you?

It's a good idea to keep a wrench near the gas shutoff, so you can turn it in an emergency. Usually it only takes a quarter turn, so the valve stem goes from parallel to the pipe to a perpendicular position. Don't haul it around, or you may break it and then be unable to shut it off.

If you're going to shut off all the power to the house, don't just flip the main breaker. There's an awful lot of current going through that, and flipping it may cause it to arc, with unpredictable and possibly deadly results. Flip all the other breakers first (a difference of only a second or two), then the main.

If the Fire Department needed to shut off your gas or electricity, would they know where the cutoffs are? Would they be able to get to them? Make sure there's a clear path to both, and it might not be a bad idea to put some kind of instructions near the entrance to the basement: a diagram taped overhead at the bottom of the stairs, or over the downstairs doorway to your basement.

This is all stuff I picked up from my Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training. There's a lot more to learn, and I recommend this program to anyone who has it available to them.

OK, enough about the serious stuff. Go back to your regularly scheduled entertainment.