Fighting fire with education

It’s a part of firefighting that you probably don’t think of — but it does more to save lives than you could probably imagine.

There was a fire recently in a kitchen in Glace Bay. The fire department arrived, rescued two siblings from a porch roof and extinguished the fire. One of the two children, a 15-year-old girl, had found her way down a stairwell blocked by smoke, and had calmly taken her sister into a bedroom, closed the door to give the pair more time, and then went out a window to safety on the roof.

The fire department rescued them from there.

But there’s more to the story — more that started well before the fire did.

“She came over and was going to give me a hug, but I was full of water, so she gave me the knuckles and said, ‘thank you,’” Glace Bay Fire Department Chief John Chant told the Cape Breton Post. “She told me because of our fire department going into the schools to teach the kids, she knew how to save herself and her sister.”

It’s a kind of story firefighters hear regularly, and that he, in particular, has been waiting to hear.

“We’ve been going into the school system for so long that I was hoping we’d get one of these good luck stories before I actually retired,” Chant said.

Firefighters go into schools to teach basic fire safety, to get families to make escape plans, and sometimes just to familiarize children with what firefighters look like when they come into a burning building.

Children sometimes try to hide from fire; when firefighters in bulky protective equipment come into the room, wearing self-contained breathing apparatus that hisses and muffles words, children can become even more frightened.

So, a little familiarization goes a long way. So does a whole range of fire prevention methods. Reminding people to change the batteries in their smoke detectors, enforcing safe burning rules and publicizing proper precautions for everything from campfires to home fireworks — all of that is work that people often don’t connect with firefighting, despite the fact that a fire prevented is a hundred times better for everyone involved than a fire that firefighters actually have to extinguish.

Years ago, a fire department in Newfoundland handed out free smoke detectors — only to see a family escape a house fire less than a week later because the smoke detector woke them up and got them out of the house.

Fire prevention plays a huge role in keeping us safe from fire, even if it may not be the stuff of red suspenders, huge trucks or lights and sirens.

And if we can’t convince you it works, there’s 15-year-old in Glace Bay who can.