Published: November 19, 2009 06:29 pm      

NIAGARA FALLS: Fighting fire ... with information

Falls firefighters planning initiatives targeted at preventing accidental blazes

As smoke and flames filled her Monteagle Street home, 10-year-old Kheyarra Williams told her sister Khasmir, “I gotta get mommy. I gotta get mommy.”

She disappeared back into the smoke, leaving 13-year-old Khasmir at the door and never returned. Neighbors then had to restrain the teen as she too fought to go back into the burning home to rescue her mother and sister.

Kheyarra had been awakened by the smoke and then woke her sister up to get her out of the burning home.

Later Khasmir would tell her aunt, “My sister saved me and I couldn’t help her.”

The painful memories of the blaze that ripped through the home at 716 Monteagle St., taking the lives of Kheyarra and her mom, 34-year-old Tajuana Smith, were rekindled at a Thursday morning news conference at Falls City Hall. Fire Chief William MacKay called the conference to discuss investigator findings on the cause of the blaze and a new initiative to battle the causes of accidental fires.

After a moment of silence for the victims, MacKay revealed fire officials have discovered that the Monteagle Street and McKoon Avenue neighborhood seems particularly prone to accidental blazes.

Within 50 yards of the fatal fire scene, fire investigators have found there have been, since May 2007, seven accidental fires, causing almost a quarter million dollars in damage and taking two lives.

“We must come together and realize that it is incumbent on all of us to do whatever we can do to make our city and its residents as safe as possible,” MacKay said.

Holding in his hand a pamphlet given to the victims of fire, the chief said, “Our goal as a community is to eradicate fires and put the publisher of this pamphlet out of business.

In the blaze that took the life of Tajuana Smith and her daughter, fire investigators said the blaze was triggered by “unattended cooking.” The investigation also showed that smoke alarms in the home were not working.

“It aggravates me so bad,” said Smith’s aunt, Zettie Perry. “Because if the fire detectors had gone off, they would have survived.”

MacKay said new national building codes, which go into effect in 2011, could eradicate fatal fires. Those codes will require all newly built residential structures to have smoke detectors and sprinklers.

“A properly installed and maintained sprinkler and smoke detector system give you a 99.9 percent chance of surviving a fire,” MacKay said.

Statistics show that, nationwide, 63 percent of all fire fatalities that occur in a home, happen in homes that have no smoke alarms or non-working smoke alarms.

Beginning immediately, MacKay said, the fire department will be two new initiatives aimed to reducing the risk of accidental fires.

The first initiative, dubbed “Don’t Give Fire A Home,” is designed to reach out to the community to prevent fires by making homes less prone to accidental blazes. MacKay this will be done by taking a proactive approach to educating residents and partnering with them to conduct safety surveys of their homes to eliminate risks.

The fire chief said Niagara University, which has many students living off campus in the Monteagle-McKoon neighborhood and the Falls block clubs, will play a key role in working with firefighters on the initiative.

“It’s about working with people, one-on-one,” MacKay said. “This is not code enforcement, this is to identify and correct practices and situations within the home that can have catastrophic results.”

The second initiative is the creation of a Post Fire Safety Response Team. The team will be deployed into neighborhoods where a “significant accidental fire has occurred” and will blanket the area with material and information on how residents can prevent what happened to their neighbors from happening to them.

“You will see us out there, we are committed to making these changes,” MacKay said.

The chief said all city fire engines and ladder trucks carry a supply of smoke alarms and batteries.

“If, when we’re on a call, we discover someone doesn’t have a detectors or the batteries are dead, we can replace them,” MacKay said.