Fostoria fire chief weighs in on safety, awareness

There will always be a need for firefighters in any community.But citizens can lessen the strain on those public servants — as well as themselves — by doing their part in keeping fires from occurring.Such a need for awareness is why National Fire Prevention Week — Oct. 3-9 this year — and National Fire Prevention Month, which is annually in October, were originated in 1922."I think a lot of people think, 'Oh, I'm OK. I do enough,' with fire safety," said Chief Brian Herbert of the Fostoria Fire Division. "And a lot of people do. But I think there's a human mentality of, 'It's never going to happen to me' — until it does."The theme for this year's awareness push is, "Learn the Sounds of Fire Safety.""The first thing that comes to my mind is smoke detectors," Herbert said. "Smoke detectors, carbon-monoxide detectors — we're starting to get into the heating season again, so furnaces are going to be kicking on. (Citizens) want to make sure they have carbon monoxide detectors if they have gas anything — stoves, water heaters, furnaces."But smoke detectors are the big thing that we can't emphasize enough. We give them out for free (to city residents) and we always have. They can pick them up here, no questions asked. And we'll even install them. If they can't do it, we'll come to their house and install it for them. There's no reason not to have a smoke detector in your home, and one on every floor."A key element in that, of course, is keeping them in working order."We're coming up on the time change," Herbert said, referring to the switch to eastern standard time on Nov. 7. "That's when you're supposed to check the battery. Change your clocks, change your batteries."Some, however, don't complete that simple task and eventually pay for it."When the battery goes dead, they chirp every 30 seconds or whatever," Herbert said. "People just get tired of hearing it, so instead of replacing the battery, they just pull the battery. We've been on fatal fires where the battery was pulled out of it, and it might have made a difference. We've been to fires where we've given them a smoke detector and there wasn't anybody hurt, but the house caught fire and there wasn't a smoke detector. We gave them a smoke detector and it was still in the package sitting on the table. It just didn't get put up. That's why we started offering to put them up for you, too."Herbert, who said his department combated 21 building fires in 2020, said that if citizens ask, firefighters will visit their homes or businesses to conduct a fire-safety inspection."If you want to know the fire-safety tips on how to do things, you can contact us and we can do a home inspection," he said. "Just a voluntary home inspection; we can come through and say, 'You should probably do this. You should probably do that. Don't do this. Don't do that.' The guys will be more than happy to come and do an inspection of your home, just to make sure. There's no penalty if we find combustibles stacked around the furnace or the water heater. It's just more of an educational type of thing."But no-nos such as cluttering — especially around heat-producing items — dozing off while cooking and the use of extension cords should certainly be avoided."If we can prevent the fires, we can prevent injuries, we can prevent dollar loss, we can keep insurance rates down," Herbert said. "We have coloring books and stuff we'll be giving out in the schools (this) week. It's something they can take home and talk to their parents about: 'We need a fire-escape plan. What do we do if there's a fire?' Sometimes parents don't think about stuff like that. But if (youngsters) take this stuff home and say, 'Can we practice a fire-escape plan?' or 'Where do we go if there's a fire?' ... We talk to them about that and the reasons why."In the event of a fire, citizens will sometimes have a "fight or flight" decision to make. One thing that should not be debatable, Herbert said, is whether to call 911."If you have a fire extinguisher in your house and (a fire) is something you think you can handle, make sure somebody calls 911," Herbert said. "You'll think, 'Either I can put that out or, if it's too big, I'm getting out.' But the first thing you need to do is call 911. There have been too many fires where you think you can put it out, and by the time we get there, it's so big that it causes more damage. If they give us a call right away, we're no more than three our four minutes from anybody in town. They say fire doubles in size every 30 seconds. ... Time is everything. We can get there and give it a quick knockdown and it might save a lot of trouble."If we get there and see that you put it out, we'll give you an 'attaboy' and make sure, because you may think you got the whole fire out, but maybe it got into a vent and crawled up a wall and you don't know about it, and now it's making its way through the attic. We have thermal-imaging cameras and we can double check everything and make sure there currently isn't any fire in the walls. There is a lot of older-home construction in Fostoria, so if it gets into a wall, it'll go straight to the attic. It can go from the base to the attic and miss all of the middle floors and you don't even know it."If someone flees a building that has caught fire, Herbert advised, the person should not re-enter in an effort to retrieve someone or something."If somebody's trapped inside, we'll get there," he said. "We'll get inside and we'll get them out, whether it's mother, father, brother, sister, grandparent, pet. We will do our best to make sure. But you never want to go back into a fire. A lot of fatal fires are from people who want to go back in to save themselves a cellphone or a pair of shoes — replaceable stuff."For more information from the fire division, callers can dial the non-emergency number of (419) 435-3206.