Having a working smoke alarm in the home can make a life-saving difference. What the Red Cross Home Fire Campaign set out to do was reduce that grim toll by putting in smoke alarms where they were needed most. NFPA figures show that while fires in the home accounted for just 27 percent of all fires, they accounted for 77 percent of all civilian fire deaths and 73 percent of all civilian fire injuries. Not only are there a lot of home fires but when they do occur, they can be deadly. Those fires caused an annual average of 2,620 civilian deaths, 11,030 civilian injuries and $7.2 billion in direct property damage.” fire departments responded to an estimated average of 353,100 home structure fires per year. NFPA’s figures for the five years between 20 show that “U.S.
The National Fire Protection Assn (NFPA) is a non-profit entity that works to reduce death, injury, and property loss due to fire, and keeps statistics on fire events. There was reason enough for the Red Cross to target residential fires when it began the Home Fire Campaign in 2014. “We need to achieve about half of our goal during those weeks,” Magin says. In 2021, STA will run from April 8 to May 9. In years past, the Red Cross has run a concentrated month-long home safety push called Sound the Alarm (STA). “Our local goal,” says Maier, “is to make more than 1300 households safer by June 30th,” That date marks the end of the Red Cross fiscal year.
“Since we can’t go into homes, we will reach people remotely.” “The goal is still the same - to save lives,” says Magin Maier, preparedness manager for the Red Cross Northwest Region (Washington and Northern Idaho). Times aren’t normal, of course, so this year’s Home Fire campaign will be totally virtual. If times were normal, Red Cross volunteers would implement Home Fire 2021 by visiting homes to install smoke alarms and demonstrate fire safety techniques. The intent of the Red Cross Home Fire campaign is straightforward enough: to reduce home fire deaths by teaching fire safety lessons and by installing smoke alarms in households that don’t have them. Photo by Dennis Drenner/American Red Cross
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