Fire Chief Thomas Cannell

It’s late in the day and you just got home and you could use a little something from the kitchen. You stand in front of the refrigerator before you finally find something of interest. Fresh cooked French fries are just what are needed to warm and fill you up before bed.   You get the oil out of the cabinet, fill your pan with oil, and put the burner on to high to heat the oil. While you wait for the oil to heat up, you decide to go to the family room and play some video games.   All of a sudden, your efforts to mow down as many alien beings from the planet Zitron are disrupted by what sounds like the smoke detector going off. You put down the game controller and

You grab your cell phone and dial 9-1-1 on your way out the door so as to notify the Fire Department!

Unfortunately this situation happens all too often in South Euclid as well as the State of Ohio and the rest of the country. Nationally more than 2,500 people died in home fires in the United States in 2006 and 12,500 were injured. Fire Departments responded to 396,000 home fires, which accounted for 80% of civilian deaths and 76% of injuries that year.

Fires happen in communities throughout Ohio and often have devastating effects. 135 people have died in fires in Ohio in 2008. More than 85% of the fatal fires occurred in homes without a smoke detector or in a home in which the smoke detector did not function.

South Euclid is no exception. In 2007, we responded to a total of 2,929 calls. Of those, 1,084 were fire related. Of those 1,084 fire calls, 88 were for actual fires! That’s an average of 7.3 fires per month. This resulted in a total fire loss of property and content of $231,000. Though we were lucky that none of our fires had any fatalities, we did have civilian injuries from burns associated with those fires.

Our most common cause for these fires was unattended cooking! Things happen very quickly especially when you having cooking appliances involved. Rule #1; while doing any type of cooking, stay in the kitchen when you are frying, grilling, or broiling food. If you leave the kitchen for even a short period, turn off the stove.

Rule #2; make sure that you have working smoke detectors on every level of your home. Make sure that you test your smoke detectors at least once per month and that you replace the batteries every time you change your clock for the time change. If your smoke detectors are over 10 years old, replace them with a new more modern dual sensor smoke detector.

Should you have any additional questions about smoke detectors or fire safety in general, please feel free to contact the City’s Fire Prevention Bureau at 216-381-1214! It only takes a moment for things to get out of hand! Don’t become a statistic!

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