When I was a young boy I remember being in awe of the fire trucks and ambulances that went screeching down the street near our neighborhood. On one summer day I was amazed to hear and then see a fire engine turn on the corner where our house was and stop a few houses down the street. An ambulance soon followed the fire engine. Not knowing why those emergency vehicles had stopped in our neighborhood, I learned the truth from my mother a few days later when she told me that a 5-year old neighborhood girl had caught fire in her home and had died. That news shocked me. Apparently, this young girl had attempted to warm up some food on the kitchen stove while standing on a chair next the stove. Her dress caught fire and before anyone could extinguish the flames, she perished in that house fire. Wow!

As the title of this blog says, home fires happen every 86 seconds of every day. That's 172,900 fires every year or 473 fires every day! Home fires occur during all four seasons of the year and more frequently during holidays. If your family doesn't have a fire protection preparedness plan in place, you family is at great risk of surviving injury, death or loss of home and other assets due to a home fire. Here's a short list of the risks your family faces, if you don't have a fire protection preparedness plan in place:

• A family member may not know how to evacuate from one of the rooms in your household.
• A family member may not know how to put out a fire with a fire extinguisher.
• Your family could lose all of it's important pagers, assets and keepsakes in a house fire.
• The fire department may not get to your home in time.
• Your smoke alarms may not work.
• What will you take with you?  What will you leave behind?  Where will you go for safety?
• In most cases, you have two minutes or less to get out of a burning building!

With these staggering statistics it is imperative that every family put a fire protection plan in place. At a minimum, you need to gather the family around and at least talk about the risks, so young and teenage family members know what to do. Better yet, become informed. Put in place the resources to prevent or combat a fire (if one should occur). Resources like multiple fire extinguishers, multiple escape options for each room in your house and an options for saving important asset documents if the home was damaged or lost. To put these resources in place we highly recommend that you take our tiny course on our Fire Protection Plan Tiny Course. The course is inexpensive, will take very little of your time and will provide you with options for building your family's personalized protection and fire escape plan should the worse occur.