VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — A few loud beeps could save your family's and your life.
Sunday began National Fire Prevention Week and this year's focus is "Smoke Alarms: Make them work for you."
There are a number of different types of smoke alarms that alert families to fire in different ways.
“When the smoke alarm goes off, you may have as little as two minutes to get out of your house safely," Jessica Xenakis, the Life Safety Education Coordinator for the Virginia Beach Fire Department, told News 3.
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Xenakis and her team are spending the week visiting schools and other locations to share the need for families to have a fire escape plan and to check their smoke alarms at least once a month to make them functional.
“If your smoke alarms are yellow, they’re probably expired. You can look (for a date) on the back because smoke alarms only last about ten years," she said.
Educators with the fire department have examples of the different kinds of alarms. Xenakis recommends getting alarms that are hard-wired so they can share information with each other.
For people who are hard of hearing, there's an alarm that goes into a person's bed.
“This device will go underneath their bed and will shake their mattress so they’re aware there’s a fire in the middle of the night," Xenakis said.
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There are also alarms that allow for voice recordings. For example, some children make respond better to their parents' voices than beeping.
“If you have younger children, you want to test them at night when they’re sleeping to see how they would respond to an alarm going off," said Xenakis.
Virginia Beach firefighters say many of the house fires they respond to are still beginning with common mistakes.
"Unattended cooking, specifically, is still the number one cause of fires," said Assistant Chief Joshua Goyet with the Virginia Beach Fire Department's Community Risk Reduction Division.
He says candles left burning are still an issue too, as are electrical fires.
"Extension cords are designed to be used for less than 30 days. The best thing if you need something like that is to get something with a surge protector," said Goyet, adding that lithium-ion battery chargers are becoming more of a concern as people replace gas-power with electric. “Lithium-ion battery is what’s in your electric vehicle. They’re also found, the batteries, [running in] a lot of power tools, electric lawnmowers.”
He says chargers are designed to stop working after batteries fill up to a certain point, but off-market batteries or chargers run the risk of overheating.
National Fire Prevention Week ends Saturday, October 12.
