Every Saturday afternoon, the women and men of MCFRS go to various neighborhoods in their communities knocking on doors, handing out fire safety information, and offering to check resident’s smoke alarms. If you are in need of a new smoke alarm or just a new battery, we will install them for FREE! If you are not home you will find a little something on your door knob (look to right of this article) letting you know we were by with a list of safety tips and a number to call if you would like us to stop by your home on another day to check your alarms. Since the program started we have found that we are actually going into roughly 20% of the homes whose doors we knock on. Of that, roughly 50% of those homes do not have a working smoke alarm! The good news is that they will before we leave!
Why is it important to have working smoke alarms in your home? About two-thirds of home fire deaths occur in homes with no smoke alarms or no working smoke alarms and they can reduce your risk of dying form a fire in your home by almost half!
Here are some updated numbers from our door to door campaign through the end of April:
Homes Visited: 35,193
Smoke Alarms Installed: 1,075
Batteries Installed: 1,233
So there are several thousand homes in Montgomery County that are now a little bit safer as a result of our program! Do not wait for us to stop by your home. Take a moment now to “Put A Finger On It” and test your smoke alarms to make sure they are working!
Stay Safe,
Bill Delaney
Program Manager, Community Safety Education
4 comments:
This is a great blog post. I am very glad, as a lifelong resident of Montgomery County, that our Fire Department continues the practice of home visits on behalf of ensuring there is at least one working smoke alarm in each home.
While fire fatalities are falling nationwide a little bit each year, there is no satisfaction until no deaths occur in the place where people feel safest: in their home. Thank you to all of the MCFRS personnel who take the time to help our neighbors be more safe!
Sometimes, I find it hard to remember exactly when I last checked my safety equipment like smoke detectors.
Here's a trick I've found works really well for my smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, air filters, and anything else I need to check on a regular basis:
A cheap label maker will print out little labels that stick to stuff. Every time I check one of my devices, I print a little label with the date on it and stick it to the device.
Any time I think about it, I can simply look at any device and know exactly when I checked it last. Sometimes I'm surprised that it's been longer than I thought it was between checks. Time seems to fly by faster every year.
Labeling doesn't mean I get to check things less frequently, but it does make it easy for anyone to see when my last check was, or if I skipped a device during my inspections.
This is a wonderful program. The firefighters from Station #1 here in Silver Spring came to my house last fall. I am elderly and find it dangerous to stand on a step stool to change the batteries in my smoke detectors. They not only checked the batteries but decided my detectors were too old and replaced all three with new detectors and batteries. I send my sincere appreciation to the MC Fire Dept. and the fine young men and women proctecting us.
What an important service. Thank You..I await your visit.
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