How fire-safe is your home?
The message still isn’t getting through. Thirteen years after The Southland Times and the New Zealand Fire Service ran a joint fire safety campaign, the region is still recording too many fires.
Already this year there have been 72 fires in Southland, many of them preventable.
And Queenstown and Central Otago are not immune either – in the week before the official start of winter three houses houses in the Lakes District were destroyed by fire. The cause? Incorrect disposal of hot ashes.
The fire service has been consistent with its message – install working smoke alarms, don’t drink and fry, and dispose of hot ashes appropriately. But clearly people aren’t listening.
Which is why The Southland Times is running another fire safety campaign.
Our fire statistics are as bad, if not worse, than a decade ago.
In the nine months to September 2002, when the last fire campaign was published, there were 155 structure fires in Southland.
In those nine months, three people died in fires, two of them in September alone.
Despite years of fire safety messages, the figures have continued to climb.
In the 2013-14 year, the fire service was called to 186 structure fires in Southland, 102 of them in Invercargill. That was up from the 177 structure fires the service was called to in 2011-12. In that year, 60 of those were in Invercargill.
The fire service says the main causes of fires in the south remains the same – unattended cooking, electrical failures and failure to clean.
Invercargill Fire Risk Management officer Mike Cahill said people not correctly using smoke alarms was a huge problem.
Firefighters regularly attended callouts where they discovered smoke alarms still in their packets, in drawers and unused on top of cupboards, he said. Some of those smoke alarms were the free alarms provided through a joint initiative between the fire service and the Invercargill Licensing Trust in 2002. In that campaign, the smoke alarms were dropped in every letterbox in Invercargill in a bid to improve the city’s fire safety.
The fire service was again preparing to run a similar campaign and was working through the process now, Cahill said.
The main concern was making sure the smoke alarms were installed and used, he said.
To help that fire safety message, for the next two weeks The Southland Times will run its Hot Spots series, aimed at making Southland residents aware of the fire risks in their homes.
For the first six days we will show you how you can help keep your belongings and family safe by pointing out fire risks in each room of a house and how you can reduce the risk. In the second week we will outline the primary causes of fires in Southland and show you the most at-risk areas of the province.
Cahill will tell his story of 37 years in the Invercargill fire brigade, and a house fire survivor will tell of the horror of losing all their belongings, what they’ve learned from the experience and how it still affects their family. We will look at how education around fire safety is changing for the future and what children are being taught.
Finally, on the last day of the campaign, Southland area manager Bruce Stubbs will tell us how he thinks Southlanders are faring with the fire safety message and what he hopes the future will bring for the region.
We will also include some helpful tips on how you can keep yourself and your home more fire safe.
Stay safe Southland.