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| The Lifetone HL™ Bedside Fire Alarm and Clock alerts by sounding a loud lowfrequency alarm and by vibrating the bed. Photo courtesy of www.lifetonesafety.com |
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| The Silent Call® alerting system works with smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, weather radio emergency messages and burglar alarms, as well as ringing phones and doorbells. Photo courtesy of |
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In the United States in 2006, there were 412,500 home fires that killed 2,580 people and injured another 12,925 people. That’s scary! On the average, these same fires killed one person with hearing loss every 15 hours, and injured a person with hearing loss every three hours. That’s really scary if you are one of the 36 million Americans with hearing loss! But you don’t have to become one of those statistics. Although having hearing loss puts you at a decided disadvantage when using standard fire-alerting devices, you can put the odds in your favor if you follow these four basic steps.
Practice Good Fire Hygiene
Fires don’t know, or care, whether you are hard of hearing. They strike when provided with the right conditions. Therefore, your first line of defense in fi re safety is preventing fires from starting in the first place. Here are some of the most common causes of easily preventable house fires:
1. Smoking is the leading cause of fire deaths in the home, resulting in one out of every four home fire deaths. If you smoke, be especially careful that you do not dispose of hot ash in the trash. Surprisingly, this is the leading cause of smoking-related fires. The second most common cause of smoking-related fires is accidentally setting fire to beds and bedding. Coming in third is cigarettes or cigars setting fire to upholstered furniture. Fires in bedding and furniture typically happen when the smoker falls asleep while smoking– so don’t smoke when you are tired. Better yet, don’t smoke at all.
2. Alcohol is involved in about 40 percent of all home fire deaths. No doubt, alcohol and smoking go hand in hand. Smoking and drinking increases the odds of accidentally igniting furniture or bedding.
3. Seventy percent of U.S. households now use candles, especially during winter holidays. In 2001, candles were responsible for six percent of all fi re fatalities in the home. Forty-one percent of candle fires began in the bedroom, killing a high proportion of sleeping occupants. Candle fires often result when people use candles to light their homes when the power fails, and then forget about them, or when they leave combustible material too close to the candles. When using candles, blow them out before leaving the room or going to sleep.
4. Although heating equipment accounted for 16 percent of all home fires and 21 percent of home fire deaths, a whopping 80 percent of these fires and 66 percent of the resulting deaths came from portable and fixed space heaters. The leading cause of such fires was having combustible materials too close to space heaters. Keep the area around electric or wood-burning space heaters clear of all papers and other items that can burn.
5. Kitchens are where more fires start than in any other room in the home. In fact, kitchen fires are the number-one cause of home fires (40 percent) and home fire injuries (36 percent) and result in 15 percent of home fire deaths. The leading cause of kitchen fires is leaving the stove unattended. The solution is simple: If the stove is on, stay in the kitchen! It’s so easy to get distracted doing other things (especially as we get older) and forget we’ve left the stove on. When we can’t hear well, we typically don’t hear the little sounds that can warn us of impending doom – that’s why we need to be there to keep an eye on things. Here’s how easily and unexpectedly something can happen. One time I was hard-boiling some eggs and left the kitchen for a minute. Then I got engrossed in what I was doing and totally forgot about the eggs and the pot slowly boiling dry on the stove. What brought me running back to the kitchen much later was the sound of the eggs exploding! (Don’t count on this though. Sometimes they just crack, and don’t explode to get your attention.) Fortunately, this did not cause a fi re but it was a close call. I now have a little timer (Triple-Bel by Shake Awake® [url=http://www.shakeawake.com/product_info.php?products_id=28] www.shakeawake.com/product_info.php?products_id=28). I clip it to my belt or pocket, and if I leave the kitchen while something is cooking, Triple-Bel’s vibration, fl ashing lights and beeps get my attention when the timer goes off.
6. Clothes dryers account for the largest share of appliance fires in the home. The most common cause is lack of maintenance. Dryer vents, vent hoses and pipes can become clogged with dust and lint. The lint then catches fire, or the heat backs up into the dryer and clothes catch fire. One such fire call I answered when I was a firefighter came in at 1:30 a.m. when it was 35 degrees below zero! Although there’s no opportune time to lose a home, the cold made this incident even worse – and harder to fight, what with hoses freezing up! To prevent such fires, regularly clean and maintain your dryer.
Have Working Smoke Detectors
Since smoke detectors came into common use in the 1970s, home fire deaths have fallen 50 percent. That’s how well they do their jobs. Yet you may wonder, “Why are so many people still dying in home fires?”
Good question. The scary truth is that currently 70 percent of all home fire deaths occur in the five percent of houses without smoke detectors and in the 25 percent of homes without working smoke detectors. Just having smoke detectors in the home isn’t enough. They must be in good working order. Never disconnect a smoke detector to avoid “nuisance” alarms. Did you know that in 20 percent of homes equipped with at least one smoke detector, none of them work? That’s not only scary – it’s downright hazardous to your health!
The most common reason for smoke detectors not working is missing, dead or disconnected batteries. That is why you must check or replace smoke detector batteries at least twice a year. Fire departments recommend this be done each spring and fall when we reset our clocks between daylight savings and standard time.
Another thing that few people realize is that smoke detectors age. As they age, they become more unreliable. In fact, smoke detectors that are 10 years old have a 30 percent chance of failing. Thus, the National Fire Protection Association recommends replacing smoke detectors every 10 years.
How old are the smoke detectors in your home? I replaced all the smoke detectors in my house a few months ago. They were nine years old at the time and one had already begun failing. If your smoke detectors are more than 10 years old, throw them out and replace them with new ones. It’s important if you value your life.
Have an Effective Alerting System
Having working smoke detectors in your home is only part of the equation. It presupposes that you can actually hear the smoke detectors when they go off. Surprisingly, this is not always the case. Consider the following statistics: Twenty percent of home fires occur between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., yet these fires account for more than half of all home fire deaths.
It’s scary to think that roughly 40 percent of the people killed in home fires die in their sleep without ever waking. It’s even more astonishing to realize that roughly 30 percent of deaths due to fires in the home are caused by fires in which a smoke alarm is present and operating properly! Obviously, many people are not hearing their smoke detectors.
One reason for this is that most smoke detectors produce a relatively high-frequency (3,100 hertz) sound. Recent studies have revealed that this frequency is not particularly effective in waking
up various classes of people with normal hearing, such as children, heavy sleepers, people in deep levels of sleep, people taking sleeping pills and other medications and people who have had
too much to drink. In addition, high-frequency alarms are almost totally ineffective in alerting people with high-frequency hearing loss (which includes about 90 percent of people with hearing loss
and all deaf people).
Another reason why people with hearing loss are at greater risk from nighttime fires is that our hearing aids or cochlear implants are peacefully reposing on the bed table beside us where they can’t enable our smoke detectors to warn us. This is why those of us with hearing loss need special alerting devices to wake us.
If you have hearing people in your home, you may think you can just rely on them to warn you of a fire. This may work, but people may not always be there for you – they could be at work, shopping or traveling when calamity strikes. Therefore, you need an alarm system that meets your needs when you are alone. The good news is that, although not all devices meet all our needs in every situation, some do come close. The ideal device would not only sound an alarm, but would also fl ash a light and vibrate the bed. That would alert the three most important senses simultaneously. A hearing service dog can alert you but if you don’t have one, one of these two new systems may work for you – without having to be fed and walked.
The Lifetone HL™ Bedside Fire Alarm and Clock (www.lifetonesafety.com) alerts by sounding a loud low-frequency alarm and by vibrating the bed. This fire alarm is one of the first systems to use 520 hertz square-wave technology. Recent studies have shown that a 520 hertz square-wave sound breaks through sleep and wakes almost everyone (between 92 percent and 96 percent of people), even those with high-frequency hearing loss. Other studies have shown that intermittent bed shakers wake up virtually 100 percent of the people using them. It’s almost impossible to sleep through the double whammy of the low-frequency alarm sounding and the bed shaking.
Lifetone works with existing smoke detectors. You don’t have to purchase special ones. Note, though, that the Lifetone only “hears” smoke detectors that put out the standard T3 signal. Since all smoke detectors sold since 1998 conform to the T3 standard, this is another good reason to make sure all the smoke detectors in your house are less than 10 years old.
Each Lifetone unit is always “listening” and, if any smoke detector should go off, within 20 seconds Lifetone sounds its alarm. Another advantage of the Lifetone system is that, when one unit goes off (say, in the master bedroom), within a few seconds any other units in your house begin sounding too – even through closed doors and on different floors. Its microphone is that sensitive. A new version of the Lifetone HL alarm is in the works and will be available as soon as it receives UL approval. This upcoming version will also sound an alert if deadly levels of carbon monoxide (CO) are detected, provided the home has CO detectors. The Lifetone will signal smoke by a repeated series of three long
beeps, while carbon monoxide will produce a repeated series of four short beeps. Eventually Lifetone may also incorporate a fl ashing LED strobe visual alert. These two additions, plus its existing seven-day battery backup make the Lifetone unit close to an ideal fire alerting system.
Silent Call® (www.silentcall.com) makes another great alerting system that works with more than just smoke detectors. It can also alert to carbon monoxide detectors, weather radio emergency messages and burglar alarms, as well as to phones ringing, doorbells chiming, monitors sounding and so on. Furthermore, the Silent Call system can tie into the existing house fi re alarm or smoke detector system or work with its own stand-alone devices. I use it both ways at once. And another great feature is that all these alerts come to me instantly, whether I am out cutting the grass, working in the garage or snoozing in my reclining chair, via Silent Call’s unique vibrating wristwatch. The watch has different patterns of vibrations depending on which device activates, while a corresponding icon appears on the watch face. At night, I put the watch in its special charger on my bedside table, and if I have plugged in the bed shaker, it will shake me awake if any alerting device goes off.
Silent Call’s Sidekick II bed table receiver has all the features of the wristwatch, as well as a lighted alarm clock and battery backup. A flashing strobe light and colored indicator lights activate so I can see which device has alerted. With the Sidekick II, when an alerting device goes off, the bed shaker activates, but if I’m already awake or just getting up, I can see the fl ashing strobe light as well.
The Silent Call system can monitor up to three Silent Call smoke detectors and indicate which one is going off. It also warns when any of the detectors is not working or needs new batteries.
As its name implies, the Silent Call system does not use audible alerts. I’d love to see them incorporate sound into the next version of the system to make it even more useful for people with and without hearing loss.
Lifetone and Silent Call alerting systems are readily available from many suppliers of assistive devices for people with hearing loss.
Have a Dress Rehearsal
Now that you have eliminated as many of the common fire hazards as you can in your home, checked and replaced smoke detectors and purchased assistive devices, there is one final, but critical, step
to take. Try out the new devices and practice a fire escape plan.
Your life initially depends on assistive devices alerting you. That is why you should purchase the best. However, do you know whether your alerting device will wake you up under real-life conditions – when you are in a deep sleep, when you have had too much to drink, when you have taken sleeping pills or other medications or when your hearing aids are off?
The only way to know for sure is to have someone set them off when you least expect it and see how you react. The brain needs to learn that these sounds and sensations mean an emergency is
occurring and bolt you out of bed. The brain only learns this with practice. Firemen learn to wake up instantly when a fi re alarm goes off. Their feet hit the floor running. We need to learn to do the same.
When a smoke detector goes off, get out! There may only be two or three minutes before it’s too late. One shocking survey revealed that only eight percent of those whose smoke detectors sounded thought they were in a real fire and that they needed to get out! In another study, 56 percent said they would investigate to find the source of the alarm rather than get out. This is a sure way to increase the odds of becoming another fire fatality.
Not only do we need to take immediate action, we need to take the right action – and that means having an effective family fire escape plan. Fewer than 25 percent of Americans have an escape plan and have practiced getting out. Maybe you think that, because your bedroom window is just a few feet from the ground, you won’t have any problems getting out. Have you tried getting out that window to be sure? Maybe the window sticks, or is frozen shut, or maybe the screen refuses to budge. Maybe you don’t fit through that window, or are no longer strong or agile enough to get your body up on the windowsill. The only way to know for sure is to try it. First, experiment sometime during the day when you can take your time and see what you are doing. Then, after you have your escape procedures down pat, try escaping in the middle of the night without turning on any lights (a fire could cut your electricity). That is the true test of whether your plan really works.
Incidentally, although men are more likely to be hurt trying to fight a fire, women are more likely to be hurt trying to escape from the fire. The whole family needs to practice escape routes to be sure they are quick and safe.
Now, with working smoke detectors, an effective alerting system beside your bed and perhaps elsewhere, and a practiced escape plan, you are as prepared as a person can reasonably be for a fire in your home. Finally, because you have reduced fire hazards in your home, you have greatly reduced the chances that you’ll have to implement your plan. And if your alarm system ever goes off,
you know exactly what to do in order to save your life and the lives of those in your home. Sounds like a worthwhile endeavor, doesn’t it?
TEXTING 911
A 911 call center in Black Hawk County, Iowa, has become the first in the nation to successfully receive text messages from wireless subscribers. A live demonstration of a 911 text request for assistance to the Black Hawk Consolidated Public Safety Communications Center was held on August 5 at the Waterloo City Hall in Iowa.
“We are pleased that our county has become the first in the nation to successfully deploy text to 911,”
said Chief Thomas Jennings, chairman of the Black Hawk 911 Board. “This solution not only helps better protect our speech and hearing impaired citizens but it proves how important it is for public safety to support all forms of communication.”
This will directly impact how individuals with speech and hearing impairments communicate with a 911 operator in an emergency. Before this, deaf and hard of hearing persons had to communicate with 911 operators using a relay center or a specialized communications device. It also allows people to communicate with 911 when a voice call is not possible.
It is important to note that this solution is currently only available to select wireless subscribers in Black Hawk County. A voice call still remains the best way to contact 911 and texting to 911 should only be used in situations where a voice call is not possible.
STAY FIRE SMART! DON'S GET BURNED
Each October since 1922, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) has sponsored a fi re prevention campaign to raise awareness about the importance of fire safety and fire safety education. Fire Prevention Week is October 4 to 10, 2009, and this year’s fire prevention campaign, “Stay Fire Smart! Don’t Get Burned,” focuses on preventing fires and the deaths, injuries and property loss they cause. By providing valuable information on fire and burn prevention and safety tips, the campaign aims to help the public keep their homes and its occupants safe from fire and burns.
NFPA’s newly launched Fire Prevention Week Web site, www.firepreventionweek.org, offers an abundance of safety tips, statistical information and other resources that can be used by fire departments, teachers, families and anyone else interested in learning about fire prevention.
Neil Bauman, Ph.D., is a specialist in hearing loss and coping skills, as well as an author and speaker (and former volunteer fi refi ghter). He has lived with a severe hearing loss all his life. Bauman is the author of 11 books and hundreds of articles related to hearing loss. You can read many of his articles at www.hearinglosshelp.com. E-mail him at neil@hearinglosshelp.com.
Most of the statistics quoted in this article come from “Fire Safety Statistics from the NFPA,” compiled by the City of Marshfield, Wis.View the full article at www.ci.marshfi eld.wi.us/FD/fi restats.htm.
