October is National Fire Prevention Month
October is National Fire Prevention month and the first full week in October, the 4th – 10th of 2009, are National Fire Prevention Week.
When I was little, single digits, our kitchen caught fire through the back of the chimney in the old house we lived in. It was mostly smoldering and nobody was hurt. There was property damage and the wall got knocked down. My sister noticed it. Had it happened at night while we slept things could have been much worse.
So fires and their prevention is an important topic. What does a fire need to survive? Fire needs heat, fuel, and air. Those three things are parts of the fire triangle. If any one of the sides are gone then the fire will go out. Through the week we’ll talk about the three things needed to keep the fire going in your organization.
Fire alarms, smoke detectors (there are two types, did you know that?) are important for not having injuries as a result of a fire, and they can help warn you about a fire before it spreads, but both those things, fire alarms and smoke detectors, warn after the fire has started, or is very very close to starting in the event of smoke detectors detecting a smoldering fire before it actually flashes into fire. What would be better would be a way to detect a fire before it started! We don’t have a system for that in homes yet that I know of, but towards the end of the week I’ll talk about a tool I’ve used to great effect to detect fires in my organization and try and stamp them out before they get started.
Today I’ve talked about putting out fires and keeping them going… It’s a schizophrenic thing fire is. I use it at home for heat and I use it in the yard to get rid of yard waste, but it’s the kind of fire I want when I want it. It’s a tool that is directed, controlled, and used by me for me and by my organization for my organization. There are other fires though… and there are other types that are destructive to an organization. That’s this week’s theme. I’ll be including links to the actual fire safety topics I’m talking about in addition to the management related issues I’m talking about as well.
Fire safety is important… when you finish reading this, go check your batteries in your smoke detectors. There’s no reason not to check them now.
The October is National Fire Prevention Month by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.