Mother saves daughter from home fire
LIVINGSTON — A pregnant Park County woman woke up just in time to grab her 4-year-old daughter and flee before their home was destroyed by fire. Toni Kostman woke up early Wednesday in her mobile home south of Livingston to smoke and a beeping smoke detector. The Livingston Enterprise reports Kostman found her daughter’s room was on fire and the child asleep.
I read articles about people being consumed by fire in their sleep all the time. It seems that evolution would have favored those individuals who would awaken when there was any danger, or IOW, light sleepers.
Do people sleep more soundly now than they did in the past? Why doesn’t the smell of smoke, or the sound of a smoke alarm, always awaken someone from sleep?
Every person is different, and even an individual may have varying degrees of lucidness that changes. Some nights I can sleep so soundly that a thunderstorm will not wake me. Then there are nights I can hear every creak and groan the house makes.
WAG - Smoke alarms are designed to wake up anyone, when installed and maintained properly. We have smoke alarms in every bedroom in the house, in the hallway between the bedrooms, and several other alarms in other parts of the house. IIRC, code only requires one per floor and one in each bedroom. Yeah, we have overkill because we don’t want to die.
Keep in mind that when people panic in a fire, at home, while in bed, they often do not immediately slither to the floor like a snake and crawl out fast. Instead, they rise up, right into the smoke and heat cloud and are overcome by either/or. You do not want to smell smoke in order to decide to leave or not. If you have to smell smoke first, in many house fires that smoke is superheated and you will not survive the first wiff.
Children in particular often do not have the life experience/knowledge to recognize immediate life or death danger. And many kids, including teenagers, can sleep through practically everything, even the external stimulus of a properly installed/maintained smoke alarm.
Um the main reason people die asleep in fire is because in real life, unlike Hollywood, a fire is mostly smoke, with dangerous gases. Even if the stuff that’s burning does not emit noxious chemicals, the COx alone can be quite harmful. As any proper fireman will tell you, a couple of breaths of that air, and you slip into unconsciousness never to awake again, long before the heat will reach you and might wake you up.
That’s why the safety people try to convince people to put a smoke detector in every room.
First, evolution doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t lead towards the best ever solution, but to the best working solution under the circumstances.
It’s easy to posit a bigger disadvantage. For example, Cecil talked about strange dreams of alien abduction or floating actually being a special case of sleep paralysis, which was most likely a protection mechanism to prevent early men from sleepwalking outside when the night predators were around.
So a light sleeper might either not get enough sleep when they wake up at every sound, or they flee outside at every sound and get eaten by the predators.
Second, in evolutionary times, our style of life has changed far quicker than our genes.
My house had a seven alarm fire that I inadvertently caused (I blame National Geographic, but that’s another story).
My mom and dad had to come and wake me up out of bed, and then led me downstairs and pushed me towards the neighbors’ across the street while they rushed back inside. I remember none of that - just waking up on my neighbor’s very uncomfortable settee an hour or so later.
I can sleep through ANYTHING. A burglar kicked down my apartment door less than 10 feet from where I was sleeping, and I slept through it. The apartment building next door burned down, and I slept through it. I sleep through ringing phones, etc. as well.
The tradeoff is killer insomnia. I was actually able to watch the late-night re-run of CSPAN covering a CIA director’s confirmation hearing without falling asleep…
any home that heats with combustion somewhere in the home is best served by also having a carbon monoxide detector. the heating device can fail producing deadly carbon monoxide and not set off a smoke detector.
Kids can sleep thorugh almost anything. How many times have you seen a parent with a 2 or 3 yo draped over a shoulder sound asleep? Meanwhile the parent is talking & walking through a grocery store, outside, whatever.
No way a typcical adult could sleep thorugh being carried around upright like that.