Smoke alarms are a lot more important than you might think. If they weren’t, why would commercial fire protection services laboriously ensure that every floor of their clients’ properties, be they hotels, motels, or offices, are covered with smoke alarms? Here’s what you should know.
Three Out of Five Fatalities. – Believe it or not, 60% of home fire deaths occur in places where there aren’t working smoke alarms, according to the National Fire Protection Association. In other words, three out of five people who die in fires pass away in places that don’t have functioning smoke alarms, which, if they did, could have possibly saved their lives.
Cut Risk in Half. – Now, had those smoke alarms been properly functioning, there’s a very good chance that they could have gone on to save lives, because working smoke alarms have been found to reduce the risk of possible fire-related fatalities in half.
Battery Failures. – Now, the reason smoke alarms sometimes fail isn’t usually because they’re busted, although that can be the case at times. Rather, the reason smoke alarms don’t go off is usually because of an issue with the battery. In most cases, it’s because the battery is missing, disconnected, or dead. Someone might have decided to take the battery out to use it for a radio; or they might have taken it out because what they were cooking was smoking, and setting it off; or they may have just plum forgotten to replace it. These are things that can happen, but they shouldn’t.
If you want to keep your family, your home, and yourself safe from a fire, you need to make sure your smoke alarm is working. If you have any questions about doing fire alarm inspections on your home’s alarms, feel free to share in the comments.
