Local firefighters focus on an ounce of prevention

Prevention is better than cure. Erasmus said it in the 15th century, and when Benjamin Franklin was organizing Philadelphia’s Union Fire Company in 1736, he said it too.

True to the spirit of this advice, the firefighters at Sun Peaks Fire Rescue (SPFR) have been on a campaign to, over the next five years, visit each home in the community to check their fire alarms. In their visits so far, they’ve knocked on 160 doors, and tested 44 homes. They began in the resort’s first developments, and oldest homes, in the west end of the community.

“Probably the biggest point we’re trying to let people know . . . is that if this is a smoke detector that’s been there since day one, it may or may not work,” explained SPFR’s Cpt. Colin Cannon. “(By 10 years) the detectors get dusty, they get spiders in them (and) in a fire situation, this can make them stop working.”

Of the homes they visited, SPFR replaced 17 smoke alarms, and provided corrective action (such as battery replacement) to an additional five. That amounts to 50 per cent of smoke alarms tested requiring some level of corrective action.

These figures amount to a successful campaign, for Cannon.

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“We replaced ones that were basically not working, or were old, and there were (places) where the wires were hanging down but there was no smoke detector on it,” said Cannon of their findings. “(It was) horrifying to find we’d go to test (an alarm) and . . . we found that someone had disconnected it and stuffed the wires back up into the (ceiling) and re-attached the smoke detector. And that scares the hell out of me because if that’s a rental unit then the next guy that rents that place has no idea the smoke detector wires have been disconnected.”

Unbelievably Cannon reports that hotel guests sometimes disconnect smoke alarms too, so cleaning staff across the mountain have their eyes open to check for functioning alarms as they attend to rooms.

On top of this community education SPFR continues to work closely with Sun Peaks students at the elementary and high schools.

This year’s educational theme was prevention of kitchen fires, as almost half of house fires begin in the kitchen. For home practice, the students were asked to have their parents test their smoke alarms and report on their ages. The response, said Cannon, was really positive.

Fire alarms should be tested regularly and need to be replaced every 10 years. Cannon explains that no one alarm style is better than the next, but it is important to ensure hard wired alarms have a battery backup in case of power failures.

“We know that smoke detectors save lives,” said Cannon. “The thing’s not exactly a really pretty thing in your house, so why would you have it if it wasn’t really going to do what it was supposed to do?”