News: Old smoke alarm may have led to woman's death in fire | alarms, smoke, fire, believe, power - OCRegister.com
Will your 10-year-old smoke alarm fail you?
Investigators say 60-year-old might have escaped her San Juan Capistrano home if her 35-year-old alarm had been operating.
This was sent to me courtesy of Jim C in the online class. Jim comments:
(This)kind of goes along with (our discussion of)complacency.
How many of us took the time to replace the batteries in our smoke detectors in our homes while we were changing our clocks for daylight savings? Put a new one if it needs it or not. If it is older, replace it. If you don’t have one, get one.
We should all take a little tour of our own homes now and again and make them safer and easier to escape from. Fire prevention starts at home. Check out the link, it’s a sad thing to think about a $10 device could have changed the outcome for this family.
I think Jim makes a very valid argument. Read the story and see what you think. The link to the original story has more photos and lots of worthwhile info on smoke detectors.
Thanks Jim!
SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO – It may have been a fire burning in the floor below Rita Sales' bedroom that killed her, but investigators believe it was a smoke alarm that failed her.
The 60-year-old woman and her dog were in the bedroom when the fire began smoldering in the family room at 10 p.m. Jan. 25, officials said. It took firefighters about an hour to put out the blaze in the two-story home in the 33600 block of Avenida Calita, but investigators believe Sales might have been able to get out if the smoke alarm outside her bedroom had worked.
"We don't believe the smoke alarms were activated," said Chief Investigator Devin Leonard of the Orange County Fire Authority.
Investigators believe Sales' home was equipped with the same hard-wired smoke alarms that were included when the home was first built in 1973. Although the smoke alarms should be replaced every eight to 10 years, officials believe that most of the 400-plus homes in the same tract, like Sales' home, are using the same, ineffective alarms.
This Saturday, about a dozen firefighters are expected to be sent door to door in the tract where Sales lived to inform residents about the need to replace smoke alarms that could be more than 30 years old. The simple practice of replacing the alarms and checking the battery power could save lives, said Laura Blaul, Fire Authority fire marshal.
Hard-wired smoke alarms are connected to the home's power supply and use a battery as a backup. Although batteries should be replaced every six months, the entire smoke alarm needs to be replaced every 10 years. Because they are connected to the home itself, many homeowners have an incorrect notion that hard-wired alarms don't have to be replaced, like battery-power-only detectors, she said.
In the past six years, about 70 percent of fires in the county have been in homes equipped with ineffective smoke alarms, Blaul said.
Click HERE to read the rest of the story. It has lots of good info in it!
