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Show How to organize home exit drills Submitted by the Park City Fire Protection District Would you know what to do if you were roused from sleep by the smell of smoke, or the sound of your smoke detector? Would your children? Here's a blueprint for a fire-wise home exit drill program that will teach members of your family to save themselves when fire strikes. Drawing a floor plan of your home, find two ways out of every sleeping room. Drops of more than eight feet are not acceptable you may have to provide emergency escape ladders for second-story bedrooms. Now involve the whole family in the Dlan. Teach each one to do the following: Roll out of bed to the floor and crawl to the door. (The air is better down low when smoke is heavy. ) Feel the door. If it's cool, crawl to safety. If it's warm, use the window to escape there may be a fire in the hallway. Install escape ladders in second-story bedrooms. Meet the rest of the family at a designated point outside a tree, a lamp post, the mailbox. Then don't go back for anything. Extra points to remember: Designate Desig-nate specific people to rescue young children and the infirm. And don't call the fire department from a burning building. After everyone escapes, call from a neighbor's phone or public phone. To make sure everyone knows his role, hold practice drills. Some may be annouced, others may be an unscheduled test of the smoke detector. (All this planning assumes that you take simple precautions like having a smoke detector for every level of your home. ) When a fire strikes, there's no time to plan or organize. So plan now. Then each member of your family will have the knowledge, the skills and the hardware to save his or her own life. |