Taking action before tragedy strikes again
Fire prevention week a reminder of deadly winter in Southwestern Ontario
After one of the region’s deadliest fire seasons in years last winter, Southwestern Ontario officials have added reason to underline fire prevention in their annual campaign this week.
A series of blazes ripped through homes in southern Ontario late last year, killing 18 people.
The regional toll was felt from Woodstock to St. Thomas, and on a London-area native community where a family of five died in a house fire investigators later determined was set by a child.
As the home heating season arrives, the key to avoiding similar tragedies is education and prevention, officials insist as Fire Prevention Week, organized by the National Fire Protection Association, begins.
This year’s theme — Every second counts: Plan two ways out — draws a line to every household, urging occupants to make plans to escape a blaze not through one exit but two.
“It’s important for everybody in the home to plan two ways out of their home,” said Jack Burt, London’s assistant deputy fire chief.
“It’s also important to have a meeting place outside where everybody knows where they are.”
While the frequency of fire calls is unpredictable, Burt said there’s typically a spike as temperatures begin to drop.
“When you start putting home heating into play — wood stoves, stuff of that nature — there’s a potential for a greater risk of fire,” he said, noting the importance of cleaning chimneys and fireplaces and proper maintenance of heating appliances.
Besides fire risks, home heating season brings the risk of poisoning from carbon monoxide, an odourless, colourless gas emitted during the combustion process.
Furnace and other exhaust vents blocked by snow or other obstruction can cause carbon monoxide to build up inside a home.
Carbon monoxide detectors, not just smoke alarms, are now mandatory outside all sleeping areas in Ontario homes where fuel-burning takes place, a move the province adopted more than three years ago in the fallout of a 2008 tragedy in Woodstock when a family of four, including an OPP officer, died after a blocked chimney allowed carbon monoxide to accumulate inside their house.
St. Marys fire chief Richard Anderson said winter typically heightens his department’s calls.
“As we head into the winter we tend to find more residences and structural-type incidents,” he said.
This week’s fire prevention campaign should be a timely safety reminder for all, said Neil Anderson, Stratford’s deputy fire chief.
“It’s always good at this time of year to give that refresher to everyone,” he said.
The staggering run of deadly house fires in southern Ontario last December included a blaze on the Oneida First Nation settlement, southwest of London, where a father and four boys, including a baby, died. The mother of the boys and four other kids weren’t home at the time.
Investigators determined the fire had been set by one of the children who died, but did not say how.
The fire broke out in bitter cold in the community of 1,300, and happened around the same time of another deadly house fire in Port Colborne, where two women and two children died.
House fires last season also killed in Woodstock, where two people died in separate blazes days apart in December, in Palmerston where another resident died that month, and in St. Thomas, where a New Year’s Day blaze killed a 58-year-old man.
Fire Prevention Week is timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, a three-day inferno that killed 300 people and displaced 100,000.
“When fire starts, fire spreads quite fast and the potential for flashover in a home can be as quick as three minutes, which means that nobody can survive in the home at that point,” Burt said.
The fall fire prevention campaign also comes with reminders to change the batteries in smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors.
It’s important for everybody in the home to plan two ways out of their home. It’s also important to have a meeting place outside where everybody knows where they are.