Important: Fire safety awareness, have we done enough preventive measures to protect our loved ones?

Have you done enough preventive measures to protect your family from fire hazard? Fire outbreak can happen anytime. It could be due to our mistakes or somebody else’s. In order to minimize the unwanted effect to our family, here are some fire safety issues that you need to ponder.

Fire outbreak can happen any time

Have you protected your house from fire? Let’s do the following checklist.

• Check all your electric plugs and ensure none of them are overloaded. Short circuit are one of the most cited reason of household fire.
• Have you installed smoke detectors in your home and ensure that they are working properly? If you haven’t, get one now and install in appropriate locations. Smoke detector helps us to detect fire early, and especially at night when most people fast asleep, its loud alarm will tell you should there be fire outbreak.
• A small fire extinguisher is your best friend to put out small fire. Have the small size one (1 kg) to stand by in your house. Do note that different cause of fire may require different ways of putting it out. So before using your fire extinguisher, always ensure that it is the right one to use.

Now, let’s get your family members prepared. Do they know what to do and what NOT to do in the event of fire?

Does your family member know what to do in the event of fire? A brief lecture on the following may help:

•  How to escape (this is especially important if you stay in high-rise building, such as most of us in Singapore do). Make sure they understand simple things like never take lift, don’t jump from high floor (I’ve seen videos of people jumping from 6th floor during fire outbreak, and they landed on concrete floor),
  go down, not go up
• What to do when they are trapped. Stay low, don’t cover their body with blanket or anything, fire can melt them into skin, remove spectacles (it can break into pieces) and contact lens (it can melt into your eyes)
• Whom to contact (the emergency contact). Ok, some of you may argue ‘come on, every body knows about this’, but in Singapore context where a lot of foreigners have come and become residents, this is not something familiar to them. Well, when I attended the fire safety talk, somebody even mentioned the emergency contact in his home country). Things like this, some people may think it’s a small thing, but it is actually crucial.

Some of you might be interested to invest on a smoke hood that allows you to breath inside a smoke-polluted space. If you decided to get one, make sure it compiles with all safety regulations. Get in touch with your nearest fire prevention centre to learn more details.

That’s about all that I can share with you. For your info, this is a take-home note from fire safety talk that I recently attended. I truly am grateful to the organizer for choosing such an important topic, because I learnt a lot from the talk. And I feel it is just right to share this important info with you.

Btw, are you interested how fire-ready the people who attended the talk? Let me share you some rough statistics. Among 50 attendees:

• Only 5 installed fire detectors in their house
• Only one has fire extinguisher on stand by at home
• Half of them are not sure on which emergency contact to call
• Some of them choose to go up to escape from fire

What can we learn from this statistics? That most people take it for granted that fire hazard won’t happen to them. So they don’t get prepared at all. Wake up, people! You don’t want your family to be the next fire hazard victims.

Now, let me ask you once again. Have you done enough preventive measures to protect your family from fire hazard? If your answer is no, then do it NOW.
If you feel this article is helpful, please help spread the awareness. Share this article to your loved ones!