Hi, I'm Catherine Breault and I'm with the King
County Fire Chiefs Association and this is our holiday safety house.
This house is designed to show us some of the hazards
that you and your family might encounter this holiday season.
We're going to look at ladder safety,
including lights and how to properly position your ladder.
Every year,
fire departments across the country respond to numerous calls for people
that fell off of the ladder and suffered some injuries.
A fall from even four feet up can actually be life threatening.
We're going to move this around
and see if we can't make it a little bit more stable.
There we go.
That's much better.
Now it is stable.
It is going to be a lot safer for me to climb.
Now that I'm up here you can see I have a lot more room to work
and be able to access my lights and fix them.
And then also, I'm not leaning out over the ladder
anything that would be unsafe.
So this ladder is definitely
the proper height for being able to work on these lights.
We're going to look at generator safety and carbon monoxide poisoning.
Carbon monoxide poisoning is a deadly gas.
It can be something that builds up in your home.
And when using a generator, we never want to use them inside.
Inside a shed, garage or any other type of environment.
Carbon monoxide actually builds up incredibly fast when using a generator,
and today we're going to demonstrate that for you.
So as you can see, we are not that far from our portable
generator and the carbon monoxide levels got dangerous within a minute.
So if your portable generator is located anywhere near your home or somewhere
that's not properly ventilated,
you can experience those signs and symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning
fairly quickly.
We want to look for dizziness, loss of consciousness, fatigue, vomiting.
Any of those signs and symptoms we want to get out of the house immediately.
If you're using a portable generator, always make sure it's far enough away
from any type of open window door that it's safe to use.
We recommend about 15 feet.
We're going to go inside and look at heater safety.
You may want to hit your home with a portable space heater,
but before you do so, we want to make sure you're operating these in a safe manner.
first off, make sure you plug this directly into the wall
and do not plug this into an extension cord or a power strip, as
that can be a fire hazard.
The other thing, too, is make sure it's placed
at least three feet away from anything that's combustible,
whether that be blankets, curtains or pillows.
Also, make sure that children and pets are a safe
distance away from the heater as it can cause burns.
We're going to look at cooking fires and some of the dangers
we might encounter in the kitchen and how to prevent them.
So while we're cooking, especially if we're cooking with hot oil,
you want to have a lid nearby, have it ready.
And if you do get a grease fire in this pan, never, ever throw water on it.
If we throw water onto a grease fire, it's going to cause it to flare up.
Get up into your cabinets.
It's going to splash out onto your countertops
and it can create a big fire, so never throw water on it.
The best thing to do for a grease fire is to grab your lid
and come at it from the side and slide it over your pan.
Now you have a tight fitting seal and all fires need oxygen to burn.
And when you put this lid on it, you're
depriving that fire of oxygen and it will go out pretty soon.
We're going to look at electrical safety around our Christmas tree.
A lot of people tend to use some some kind of weird,
you know,
extension cords and maybe even multiple prong adapters.
And we just want to avoid those as much as possible.
So we're just going to remove these out of here
and clean it up a little bit.
And then what we really want to do is we want to focus on
plugging those directly into a plug bar.
And last of all, we're going to look at our smoke detectors and candle safety.
If you are deciding to light actual candles, what you want to make
sure is that they're not placed too close to combustible objects.
So what we'd recommend is that you move this candle away from the object,
but also make sure that it's not too close to the edge where it could fall off.
Additionally, when we have children around the house,
they may be running around and they like to tug on things.
So you want to make sure that kids aren't able to tug on the tablecloth
where the candle would then fall and start a fire.
It's really important that with smoke alarms that you have one
installed in every bedroom, in your house, on every floor of your house
and in the hallways, right outside sleeping areas.
Now smoke alarms for testing.
They should be tested every month.
And the way to do this is to press the button on the smoke alarm,
which I'm going to demonstrate now.
Wait for it to chirp just like that.
And now we know that the smoke alarm is working correctly.
So we might be doing this holiday safety house
because we think of hanging lights and other things.
But actually, these are safety hazards all year round.
We get up on ladders to clean out our gutters.
We use our generators.
Inside we're always cooking.
We talk about fire extinguishers inside.
That's something you should have in your house,
no matter what time of day you're cooking.
And we have a mnemonic that we use.
It's called PASS.
It's pull, aim, squeeze, sweep.
So they all have this little tab in here that the first thing you want to do
is pull that out. That prevents
when it's in from you accidentally discharging your extinguisher.
So you're going to pull that out,
you're going to take your hose and aim it at the base of the fire.
You're going to squeeze the handle to discharge the extinguishing agent
and then you're going to sweep back
and forth at the base of the fire to put that fire out.
If you don't get it out right away again, exit the home and call 911
and get the fire department coming.
We just want to make sure everybody's safe this holiday season.
We're all getting together.
We're all joining with families.
The COVID pandemic is still ongoing.
We want to enjoy each other, but we also want to make sure we're being
safe about it.
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