Thank you First Alert for sponsoring this post. October is National Fire Prevention Month and is the perfect time to gather your family and discuss fire safety.
When school began a few months ago, our kids were discussing and practicing a variety of safety drills at school. Those drills prompted them to come home asking about our safety procedures at home, namely fire safety.
Since we have moved into our new home, we haven’t yet sat down with our children to go through a fire safety checklist or develop a new emergency escape route.
October is National Fire Prevention Month, which inspired us to sit down as a family to create our fire safety checklist and ensure that we had First Alert’s reliable protection in our home.
Safety Tips for Your Home:
We began with First Alert’s Fire Safety checklist. We used it to guide us as we walked through our home as a family, checking that we had everything on the list and that it was in working order.
- Check that you have carbon monoxide (CO) alarms on EVERY LEVEL and in EVERY BEDROOM of your home.
- Designate a day each month to test all of your fire alarms. Mark that day on your family calendar so that your children can take ownership of this responsibility as well.
- Change the batteries in your fire alarms every 6 months (again mark these dates on a family calendar). Or, for hassle-free protection, upgrade to First Alert’s 10- year sealed battery alarms to eliminate battery replacements. Just remember that these won’t last forever and you will need to replace them every 10 years!
- Be sure that you have Fire Extinguisher on every level of your home, especially near your kitchen and your grill. Laundry rooms are great places to store Fire Extinguishers.
- Plan and practice an emergency escape plan with your family at least twice a year. Be sure you discuss 2 ways out of every room in your home and designate a meeting spot that is a safe distance away from your home.
Once we walked through each component of the fire safety checklist and marked our family calendar with reminders to test fire alarms (and replace batteries where appropriate), we practiced our escape routes from each room in our house, the very last step in our fire safety discussion.
Fire Safety Statistics You NEED to Know:
- #1 cause of fires is unattended cooking
- 3 out of 5 home fire deaths occur in homes with no smoke alarms or no working smoke alarms.
- A Fire Department responds to a fire every 24 seconds in America.
- Carbon Monoxide is ODORLESS and INVISIBLE. The only way to protect your family is to install CO detectors in your home.
I really enjoyed doing this with my family and making a plan together put my mind at ease. Gather your family, print the checklist and walk through these life-saving steps a few times throughout the year. Your family’s best defense is to be prepared and ready for an emergency.
And then, be sure to promote your kids to Jr. Fire Marshall. After all, they’ve been part of the hard work that it takes to keep everyone in your family safe during National Fire Safety Month!
