Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
I have just completed "Fire Marshall" training with my employer. While this has been valuable for work, of course, it also made me think about fire safety in my home. We do have smoke detectors in every room which I regularly test and replace the batteries in. We have a CO2 (I run a few computers at home) and a couple of water fire extinguishers there and the obligatory fire blanket in the kitchen. But what about exiting the house in a fire situation? I'm not entirely sure how I'd get out from an upstairs room if the stairs was blocked or at risk.
We've been looking at houses lately and one with a converted attic has appealed to us - but now I've started thinking about how I'd escape from there if one of the stairs were compromised.
While I don't think anyone should lose any sleep worrying about such things, I do recommend you have a brief think about such things yourself. Think about planned escape routes, how you'd navigate them in the dark or through smoke. Think about where you keep accelerants in your house: the liquor cabinet, petrol for the lawn-mower, paints and solvents for DIY, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think I've eschewed safety in the home, nor do I think that my home is at risk in the case of fire (more than any other comparable dwelling, at least) but I'll certainly be looking for simple things that can be changed to maybe make it a little bit safer. Given the average time for a dropped match in a living room to turn into an inferno is 3 minutes, every second counts.
Be safe.
posted at: 13:50 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
