Fire safety

Fresh from Google News... rooming house with no fire alarms burned down.

Maybe my years in engineering at nuclear power plants made me paranoid, but I seem to be the only one in the family who is concerned about personal or fire safety. One relative in particular has been known to shingle steep roofs 3 floors up in the rain, with no safety belt, while thunder was in earshot. Others, raised in the country, couldn't conceive of locking doors. Nobody seems very concerned about safety, especially when it comes to fires.

That's amazing. As I type this a bulletin is on TV about a local hall burning down.

Let's see if I can find a link for this one....no luck. Anyway, in the early 1990's the Quad City Times reported about a man who played a clown to entertain kids at a local restaurant.

He had boys of his own. Of course he and his wife took good care of them. They even had something fairly newfangled then - there was an audio monitor in the boys' room.

Then one day the boys were lost to a fire that started in their room. The cause? The transformer on the audio monitor.

In 2000, 85% of fire deaths were from home fires in the US. There were 3420 deaths, which was an increase of 18.1% from the previous year.

How long would it take for you to get everybody out of your place right now?