WARNING: IF YOU ARE HAVING A DAY FULL OF SUNSHINE AND HAPPINESS, DO NOT READ THIS POST.
http://www.pressconnects.com/today/news/stories/ne071101s4.shtml
This happened locally. An exerpt:
LISLE – The smoke detectors that fire officials said might have saved the life of a teen-ager in a fire at her Lisle home last weekend were removed by her mother years ago, authorities said Tuesday. The girl’s brother suffered extensive burns in the blaze.
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“If anyone is to blame, it’s me. I took the smoke detectors down,” Smith said Tuesday as she grieved for her daughter, Donna, and watched over her critically injured son, Timothy.
PLEASE! Go home and check your smoke detectors. Replace the batteries. If you can’t afford a smoke detector, call your local fire department, who will likely give you one for free. If you are a landlord, check your tenants apartments for working detectors.
The heartache this death and critical injury have caused our community is just awful. Such a God-awful shame.
Zette
I read about this. Syracuse has a top-rated burn unit: he’s getting good care there (my mom and one of my students were treated there in seperate incidents).
We had a fire in St. Cloud not too long ago where a mother, her child and four children she was baby-sitting died. There were no working smoke detectors in the home. The local fire department gives them out free to anyone who asks.
A few days after the fire, some slimeball was going door-to-door, selling smoke detectors to the elderly, claiming the $10 ones in the store were not as good as his, and the ones given out by the fire department had a 100% failure rate. He managed to scare one woman into paying $600 for one of his smoke detectors.
They haven’t caught the cockroach yet. At least a lot more people have smoke detectors, thanks to the fire department.
Thought this deserved a bump.
I don’t know if this is a national program or not, but one of the best ideas I’ve heard is to change your smoke detector batteries at the same time that you change your clocks for daylight savings time …every spring and every fall.