EDMONTON – Hollywood has made heroes of firefighters, but fire captain Tim Vandenbrink figures the myth makers owe them.
Movie fires look overly dramatic with explosive fireballs and second-storey leaps to escape. The truth is simpler, said Vandenbrink, of the public safety and education branch of Edmonton’s Emergency Response Department.
He told a national health and safety conference Nov. 6 that 47 percent of all fires in Canada happen in the home. Most of the time parents, holding their children by the hand, exit through the front door, warned by a smoke alarm. There is no crawling along the hallway, flames leaping in the background.
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That doesn’t mean there are not problems with the firefighting image. Vandenbrink said in some ways the department has done too good of a job.
Children can parrot the phrase “Stop, drop and roll” when asked what they would do if faced with a fire in their home. While that defence works if their clothes are on fire, it is not helpful in a house fire.
As a result, Vandenbrink said too often during real fires “my people pull them out from under beds and closets.”
Adults and children also know to phone for help in case of fire, but too few of them know the number or remember to give their address or
location.
For rural residents, the advent of 911 has answered one issue, but rural emergency people don’t always know farmland locations even if the caller remembers to give it.
On a clear day the fire truck can follow the smoke in the air, but there are no similar markers at night or with cases of heart attack or machinery accident.
Vandenbrink said response times to fires are good in Canada – three minutes in cities and five minutes in rural areas. However this country’s death rate per capita is higher than most other industrialized countries. The problem is complacency.
“I can get 700 children out of school in 11/2 minutes,” in a fire drill, said Vandenbrink. But in a hotel or office building, adults don’t move when the fire bells ring, or, at the most, pop their heads out into the hallway to see if they can smell smoke.
Vandenbrink said he now tells people to take three minutes to do a fire drill in their own home. And practise it, again and again, so that like any six year old, your family will react automatically when they hear the smoke detector.
He practised with his own family, starting by rewarding his two-year-old daughter with a hug and a cookie when she came to him as soon as she heard him press the detector’s test button. When older, both his daughters could recite the house fire plan, including running to a neighbour’s house to phone the fire department with their location and name.
In February 1992, when his 12 year old was alone in the house and trying out a home economics cooking lesson, the kitchen caught fire. The girl knew just what to do and today Vandenbrink has a framed photocopy of the fire investigator’s report that says damage was limited because of “the prompt response of the resident.”
For rural residents, Vandenbrink has some advice that begins with putting smoke or fire detectors in their homes. He said 85 percent of the people who die in house fires have no detector or the batteries have been removed.
Rural people tend to be less compliant about safety – not using seatbelts, driving fast on grid roads and working alone without safety equipment.
When building a new house or barn, Vandenbrink suggests a sprinkler system be installed. For a house, it represents the cost of a living room rug. For a barn, it represents less than two percent of the total cost of the building and can mean insurance savings, as well as safeguarding a potential million dollar investment.
As part of a rural fire plan, one of the outbuildings should contain extra car keys and warm clothing in case of a quick exit from the house on a winter night since neighbours may be several kilometres away.
Vandenbrink also suggests that fire departments in rural areas recruit different groups of people. A retired teacher can deliver a fire prevention message and a woman can fight fires.
“Some guys are too macho and ask if she can carry a 300 pound person down stairs. I say, ‘can you?’ We train as teams and work together. We don’t do things alone.”
