Spate of Fire Deaths Has Officials Sounding Alarm Over Smoke Detectors

Rural as well as urban communities being targeted; local groups’ involvement seen key to smoke detector awareness

Safety officials across the Northeast have ramped up their efforts to raise awareness of smoke detectors after a rash of major fires claimed numerous lives and injuries.

In the wake of a Bronx fire last year that killed nine children and one adult, the New York Fire Department earlier this month announced its largest ever fire safety campaign — called Sound the Alarm — which will focus on the promoting the use smoke detectors

“There is no question about it, smoke alarms save lives,” fire department Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said. “These devices can provide an extra few minutes that can mean the difference between life and death, but only if they are working.”

The campaign, funded by a $900,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, features television, radio, print and Internet public service announcements. The message: New Yorkers need to install smoke detectors and maintain them properly.

There were 95 fire deaths in New York City in 2007, including the 10 immigrants from the west African nation of Mali who perished in a Bronx house in March. That number was up from 85 in 2006, although the trend is down slightly over the last few years.

The last six years have seen an average of 98 fire deaths annually, Fire Department of New York officials said.

The Bronx home where the Mali natives died had two smoke alarms, but neither had batteries.

U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano, the Bronx Democrat who helped secure the funding for the campaign, said, “Our community knows the danger of house fires all too well. Taking steps to prevent them is of utmost importance.”

In cities elsewhere across the Northeast, this winter has seen numerous fire deaths in homes without working smoke detectors. Earlier this month in north Philadelphia, a blaze claimed the lives of a man and two children as it tore through a row house without working smoke detectors. Eight other people escaped.

The recent spate of fire deaths is by no means strictly an urban phenomenon. Communities of less than 2,500 people have the highest fire death rate in the nation: 30.9 deaths per million people — at least twice that of larger urban centers, according to the U.S. Fire Administration.

These smaller rural communities tend to be poorer and depend on volunteer fire departments, researchers from the National Fire Protection Association have found. Eighty percent of those fire companies lack programs for free distribution of smoke alarms, which cuts the risk of death from a fire nearly in half, according to the report.

At least 70 percent of fire departments serving communities of 100,000 or more give away smoke alarms.

Researchers looked at government-funded projects that have installed thousands of smoke alarms in poor, rural communities in the Southeast and Southwest. They found that a key common denominator was the involvement of local groups, civic leaders and volunteers.

“In any given community, a fire-service person may be a natural choice to get the ball rolling, but they need to know how to identify people in the community who know how to get things done,” said lead researcher Sharon Gamache, of the NFPA in Quincy, Mass.

To that end, the report advises rural fire companies to seek help from public and private health-care workers, churches, schools, senior citizen centers, rural electrical cooperatives, cooperative extension programs and others to distribute smoke alarms door to door. The USFA provides grants to fund such programs.

But which smoke detectors are best? The federal National Institute for Standards and Technology and the NFPA say that homes really need two separate types of detectors.

About 90 percent of American homes use so-called ionization smoke detectors, in which electronic sensors trigger an alarm when smoke blocks the current flowing between them. Experts say these detectors are highly effective in detecting fires that move quickly.

However, another less-common type- so-called photoelectric smoke detectors — is far better at detecting smoldering, slow-moving fires. Photoelectric detectors contain a light source and a light-sensitive electric cell. Smoke entering the detector deflects light onto the light-sensitive cell, triggering an alarm. In tests, the NIST found ionization smoke detectors sounded in fast, flaming fires an average of 50 seconds earlier than photoelectric detectors. But in smoldering fires, photoelectrics sounded their alarms on average 30 minutes earlier than ionization detectors.

Outside the lab, these differences can have deadly consequences.

In 2005, a slow-moving fire in Barre, Vt. killed a mother and four children. Firefighters arriving at the scene were puzzled to discover an apartment full of smoke that had a working smoke detector, but hadn’t sounded its alarm.

Months later, Fire Chief Peter John found out why: The smoke detector was an ionization smoke detector.

Now, John and others in his department have joined a campaign to publicize the benefits of photoelectric smoke detectors.

It’s a message that Deputy Fire Chief Joseph “Jay” Fleming of the Boston Fire Department says he’s been trying to spread for years. Fleming estimates that nationwide, up to a third of the more than 3,000 people a year who die in fires might have escaped if they’d had a photoelectric smoke detector.

“The federal government has known about this problem since at least 1980, and have never done anything about it,” Fleming recently told lawmakers in Vermont, where a pending bill would require photoelectric detectors in all new construction in the state.

Nationwide, other industry groups are warming to the idea of installing detectors that use both types of technology. John Drengenberg, manager of Consumer Affairs for Underwriters Laboratories, said his organizations recommends residential homes have both smoke alarm technologies installed where appropriate.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.