Published: October 31, 2009 12:33 am      

COPS NOTEBOOK: How to save a life

It’s that time of year when I am going to join with Falls firefighters and give you some of the best lifesaving advice you’ll ever get.

Tonight is Halloween and the end of Daylight Savings Time so while you’re getting the kids into their best and scariest outfits and turning your clocks back an hour, please take a few minutes to check each and every smoke detector in your home. Then, whether you think they need them or not, put brand new batteries in them.

As Falls Fire Chief William MacKay points out, a properly installed and working smoke alarm gives you and your family a greater than 90 percent chance of surviving a fire. You gotta like those odds, they are better than anything you can get at Seneca Niagara Casino.

Early warning of a fire is the best way to improve your chances of surviving and reducing your property loss.

If you think a fire can’t happen to you, think again.

In America, someone is injured in a house fire every 40 minutes and eight Americans die every day in fires in their own home. Cooking fires, a staple in Niagara Falls, continue to be the leading cause of home fires and home fire injuries.

Careless smoking, another common Falls fire call, is the leading cause of fire related fatalities with one out of every four deaths related to discard smoking materials.

“Unfortunately America continues to be a nation in which we fail to respect the danger associated with fire and the damage that is may cause,” MacKay told me.

Yet something as relatively inexpensive as a smoke detector has been credited with saving hundreds of lives and preventing millions of dollars in damage due to fire.

Nationally, more then 96 percent of all homes have at least one smoke alarm.

Yet in situations were a death occurs as a result of a fire, and a smoke alarm was in the home, 50 percent of the time the alarm was either missing batteries or was disconnected.

Six adults and a child who used to live on Falls Street are lucky to be alive because when a fire erupted in their home on Wednesday, there was no early warning. Evidence gathered by fire Investigators has determined that there were smoke alarms in the home, but they were inoperable at the time of the fire.

In the time it takes you to read this column, statistics show at least two American families will have lost their home due to fire. Sometime in the next three hours someone in the U.S. will lose their life.

There is nothing as simple or as important that you can do tonight as changing your smoke detector batteries. And if you’re one of the 4 percent of homes that still don’t have an alarm, get to your favorite home improvement store, buy some and install them.

This isn’t something that can wait for another day.

Takes one to know one

On a lighter note, I’m amused when I find little nuggets of information in police reports that come from unexpected sources.

Take for example the intelligence passed along by a woman who wanted police to know that a motel in the 5600 block of Niagara Falls Boulevard is “a haven for crackheads and crack dealers.”

The source of her information, according to the report, she herself had purchased crack there — on credit no less, the day before.

CHANGE YOUR SMOKE DETECTOR BATTERIES!