The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
OSMS students learn fire safety
Live burn: Oneida City Fire Department gives first-hand look at dangers of house fires
WAMPSVILLE, N.Y. » It takes seconds nowadays for fire to spread beyond control, something students learned firsthand fromthe Oneida Fire Department.
For the past few days, the Oneida Fire Department has been teaching fire safety to students at Otto Shortell Middle School, a cohort that Deputy Chief Timothy Cowan said the fire department had neglected.
“We do really good at the el- ementary levels, at first, second and third grades. But we miss the middle schoolers. These are the kids that are home now, cooking meals for themselves, siblings or starting it for their parents,” Cowan said. “With kitchen fires and cooking being the leading cause of residential fires, its important to show them.”
Sixth-, seventh- and eighthgrade students at OSMS were taught first-hand how to properly use a fire extinguisher and to put out a grease fire on a kitchen stove.
That was something sixthgrade teacher Patti Murphy admits she never before had done. “Until the first time we did this here with the Oneida Fire Department, I’ve never used a fire extinguisher and I’m an adult,” Murphy said.
“Today’s household furnishings is totally different,” Cowan said. “We call it ‘solidified gasoline.’ All the plastics and synthetics burn at such an extreme rate. In years past, there was this belief that there’s a lot of time to escape the house. Now, we’re talking about literally seconds.”
Murphyhas seen the live burn many times and said the children get so much more respect for the danger of a fire.
“When I saw it the first time, I couldn’t believe it,” Murphy said. “I always thought I had more time than that to get out of the building. It’s an amazing experience.”
Set up the night before by firefighters, two mock rooms were
furnished with chairs, couches, and a wastebasket full of garbage
One of the rooms was equipped with a sprinkler system to show how important the sprinkler can be in saving a building.
The basket was lit in the first room, without the sprinkler and Cowan narrated the progression of the fire. Quickly, the room was completely ablaze and a pillar of smoke was reaching to the cloudless sky, blotting out the sun.
The students visibly flinched when the fire reached an inferno, feeling the heat from around 30 to 40 feet away and staring on in shock.
Firefighters quickly put the fire out and then demonstrated the same scenario with the room outfitted with sprinklers. Instead of the fire engulfing the whole room, the sprinkler system kicked on shortly after the fire detector sounded and doused the flames, leaving firefighters to extinguish the embers.
Students were allowed to walk by and inspect the damage of both fires before returning to class.
“I saw the live burn last year, but I forgot how fast it would go up. It was amazing,” seventh-grader Julia Bognaski said. “I wasn’t expecting the smoke to cover up the sun.”
When asked what she would say to someone who wasn’t convinced a fire would start that quickly, Bognaski laughed.
“I’d ask them if they were crazy,” Bognaski said. “Haven’t you seen a fire before?”