FIRE DRILL

Have you taught your children how to escape a house fire?
When catastrophe strikes, every second counts. Would you know what to do to get out alive?

NBC News, Feb. 21, 2000

If you’re caught in a burning building, you might know what to do, but do your kids? House fires are the number one cause of accidental death for children under the age of five. Correspondent Chris Hansen shows you how kids can learn to get out alive. U.S. Fire Safety Administration: Fire safety and prevention Survive Alive Village: Escape the Fire game Indianapolis Fire Department Juvenile Fire Setting Intervention Resource Site

My blanket was burning,” says four-year-old Bradley Paschal. What happened to his house? “It burned and it got smoke in it,” he says. Last March, Sharon Paschal and her son found out just how devastating a fire can be. “He came out of the bedroom and said, ‘Mommy, your bed’s on fire,’” says Paschal. “I was shocked. I was like, you’re kidding right? And he takes me into the bedroom and he shows me and I’m stunned.” With flames engulfing the bed, Paschal made an error that could have cost her life. “My first instinct was to run into the kitchen and get some water,” she says. She put water on the fire. “It didn’t work,” she says. “It just spread. It got worse. It spread over to the rest of the bed so the whole side of the bed was on fire. And then I grabbed the phone and I grabbed Bradley and we didn’t have anything on but what was on our backs — no shoes, nothing. And we ran out.” In a matter of minutes the fire ripped through the ranch-style home — clothing, furniture, priceless photos — all incinerated. But their lives were spared.

GET OUT ALIVE

There are some simple tips you can teach your kids that could help them get out alive in the event of a house fire. “A lot of the children that come to us really don’t know a lot about fire safety,” says Clyde Rainey, a 15-year veteran at the Indianapolis Fire Department. “They’ve often times heard something, but they haven’t put it into practice.” Rainey runs the “Survive Alive House,” where kids can experience what it’s like in a real fire. The “Survive Alive House” is a laboratory built to look like a real-home with a state-of-the art control room which monitors and simulates real life dangers. Kids can look, touch and feel their way through it all — the kitchen, the bathroom and, most importantly, the bedroom where we were surprised by what the kids did and did not know. Rainey asked a group of kindergarten children what they would do if the smoke alarm goes off.  The children’s response? “Stop! Drop! And roll?”  But “stop, drop and roll” is only correct if you’re on fire. The children tried again — “Jump out the window?” But jumping out the window should be a last resort.

SURVIVE ALIVE VILLAGE

Could you escape from a burning fire?

The Survive Alive program teaches parents and children what they need to know about fire safety from making a fire prevention checklist to planning an escape route.  According to Rainey and other experts, children as young as two, three and four should be drilled on what to do if there’s a fire — not just at school but at home. Most deadly fires happen between the hours of two and four in the morning — right when your kids will be sleeping. It’s actually the smoke from a fire, not the fire itself, that usually kills people. So the first lesson is to buy your child a little more time by making sure he or she sleeps with the bedroom door closed. ‘That’s going to give you about 15 more minutes of additional escape time,” says Rainey. So imagine you wake up in the middle of the night to the piercing sound of a smoke alarm. It’s dark and smoke is filling the room — blinding and disorienting you. Now imagine you’re five years old. There’s panic and fear. 

DON’T HIDE

What’s the first thing you would do? Children’s instincts are often to go to places they consider safe and that can be a fatal error. “We’re not going to hide in the closet,” Rainey instructs the children. Hiding places are the first areas firemen search for children, and too often rescuers get there too late. “What most parents have got to really instill into their kids is that you don’t want to hide,” says Rainey. “You don’t want to hide in a closet. You don’t want to hide under the bed, under a pile of clothes, in a toychest, nothing like that. The simple message to kids — don’t hide. Go outside.”

HAVE AN ESCAPE PLAN

The next step is to plan an escape and practice it. Rainey prepares the kids for what’s about to happen. “The smoke detector is going to come on and we’re going to get some smoke in here,” he says to the children. “Are the lights going to go out?”  The children reply, Yes. The lights are going to get a little darker, he says.  The kids learned to stay calm. The first thing we are not going to panic and we are not going to hide,” says Rainey. As the control room turns the lights down and the fake smoke starts pumping into the bedroom, we see the children scrambling to get out. The kids learn to stay low to the ground. “You’re going to crawl over to the door,” instructs Rainey. “Crawl. Crawl.” They learn to feel the door with the back of their hands before grabbing the doorknob. “Now what do you see?” asks Rainey. “You see smoke there right? Stay low. And to know two ways out. We’re going to go to our secondary exit which is over here.”  Sometimes that can mean going out the window. “You’ve got to get out quickly,” says Rainey, “but you’ve got to get out safely. So your job is to get out quick. Hold on to the sides.” It turns out there’s a right and a wrong way to do it. “Stand right up on the chair and put both hands up,” instructs Rainey. “Put one foot out, then the other foot and then you want to sit down on the roof. Crabwalk. You go hands and then heels.” Never want to back out, he says. Always go feet first.  If you are able to reach your child’s bedroom and the window is the only way out, who should go first — you or your child? “The child goes first,” says Rainey. “There have been incidences where the parent has climbed out and was going to grab the kid, tell the kid ‘jump to me, jump to me’ and the child returns inside the fire.” Once everyone is out of the house, make sure you have a designated meeting place. That way you can determine quickly whether everyone actually got out. And once they’re out, tell your kids to stay out. 

PREPARE FOR RESCUE

But what if things don’t go right and your child is trapped? It’s crucial for parents to also prepare their kids to be rescued. So make sure your child knows that a firefighter in the dark with an axe may be scary, but he’s really there to help. If a raging fire traps your child, it may be their last lifeline to safety.

KEEP MATCHES OUT OF REACH

So you’ve warned your kids never to hide in the closet, practiced the escape route, decided on a meeting place, but there’s one more thing you should know. Experts say children themselves cause most fatal fires in the home by playing with matches and lighters — in fact nearly 100,000 fires a year are set by children.  “That lighter or that matchbook in the hands of a very young child,” says Pat Mieszala, a nationally recognized expert on fire safety and children, “that’s just as deadly if not more deadly than a weapon.” She says the fascination with fire starts at an early age, which is no surprise if you think of all the magical images associated with fire — birthdays, the Fourth of July, the family barbecue. And Mieszala says lighters that look more like toys than potentially deadly weapons. “If you asked two and two-and-a-half year olds, ‘Where does your mom or dad keep their lighters or matches?’” she says, “they’ll be able to tell you. That’s how tuned in they are.” Mieszala says parents should explain the danger to the child. “A good piece to add is these are not toys, these are tools for grownups to use,” she says. “‘No’ does not teach a child about fire safety. ‘No’ is simply not enough.” Mieszala says a child’s interest in fire is normal, but parents should be on the lookout for more serious signs of trouble, such as piles of burnt-out matches, scorch marks on the mattress, underneath the bed or in the closet. But if you have little kids and you take the precaution of putting matches on the top shelf, if you watch your kids, aren’t you pretty safe? “That’s the assumption of most adults,” says Mieszala. But “placing your matches up high is simply not enough because of those momentary lapses in supervision. It has to be in a locked cabinet or in a secured place where children can’t get them.” And that’s exactly what Sharon Paschal discovered. It turns out four-year-old Bradley started the fire that gutted their home with a fireplace lighter that his mother thought was out of reach. “It was on the highest shelf,” she says. “And you actually had to open a door, to pull it down. So he climbed on the arm of the couch, opened the door and got the fireplace lighter out.” What surprised Paschal the most about the fire? “That it happened,” she says. “You never expect it to happen to you.” Your chances of dying in a house fire can be cut in half with the most basic protection — a smoke alarm. And if you already have one, when was the last time you checked the battery?

U.S. Fire Safety Administration: Fire safety and prevention

Survive Alive Village: Escape the Fire game

Juvenile Fire setting Intervention Resource Site

MSNBC COPYRIGHT 2000.

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