Oskaloosa Fire Chief Talks Fire Safety

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So we have fire chief Jeff Swanson here. You guys are at the mall today. You’re helping youngsters in their parents learn a little bit about fire safety. Can you walk us through it, some?

Absolutely, we’re here; we have a variety of materials that we have for not only the youngsters, we have the fire helmets and some stickers and coloring books, for them to do a little bit of learning.

But also we have a variety of materials for the adults that talk about making sure that you close the bedroom doors before you go to sleep. It’s called ‘Closed before you Doze’ program.

We have some other materials that talk about the address numbers on your house that we would really like to make sure that they’re prominent so that we know that we’re going to the right house, things like that. Fire extinguisher pamphlets, as well as some that talk about poison control.

So all things that are great to know the day before we have a problem, and how to actually react. This fire prevention is just a very broad subject that we like to talk about.

In this time of year, firefighters typically see an increase because space heaters come out, or wood-burning stoves or other things like that get lit up for the first time. Walk us through some of that safety. So folks can be a little more aware of it.

Absolutely. One of the things that we like to do is make sure if we have space heaters that they’re I believe it’s somewhere around three feet away from anything that would be combustible. Great way thing to do would be to test it outside before we even bring it inside, make sure that it’s functioning correctly, make sure that we’re not using extension cords with those. They should be plugged right into the wall themselves. Make sure that it has some type of tip over alarm so that if it does get knocked over for whatever reason that it actually shuts off, things like that.

So and then we talk about woodstoves we talk about furnaces, things like that, when we get into heating season, we do again like to make sure that those are checked out. And if you’re gonna check your own out, no time better to do that, then when you’re in control time of maybe some time during the day or something like that, when you have plenty of time to take care of whatever you might find that’s wrong.

Along with those pieces. If you have any type of fuel fired appliance, whether it be a wood stove, a gas furnace, anything like that, we really encourage you to have a carbon monoxide detector. That’s a odorless, colorless, deadly gas that that detector is extremely important.