American Red Cross and volunteers from Seaside Fire Department and Seaside High School Red Cross Club will canvass 200 mobile homes in Green Parrot Trailer Park, Harbor Trailer Park, & Trailer Terrace in Seaside in Monterey County to install free smoke alarms in homes that need them and help residents to create escape plans about what to do in case a fire breaks out in their home.

DATE: Sat., Jan. 16 – 10 a.m. canvassing begins

Seven times a day someone in this country dies in a home fire. Countless others suffer injuries. The Red Cross responds to nearly 66,000 disasters each year in the United States, and the vast majority of those responses are to house fires. To combat these tragic statistics, the Red Cross has launched a nationwide campaign to reduce the number of deaths and injuries due to home fires by 25 percent by the end of 2019. The Home Fire Campaign is happening all over the country and involves Red Cross workers joining with local fire departments and community groups to visit neighborhoods at high risk for fires. Those visits include educating people about fire safety through door-to-door visits and installation of smoke alarms in some of these neighborhoods.

“Installing smoke alarms cuts the risk of someone dying from a home fire in half, so we’re joining with community partners to install smoke alarms,” said Michele Averill, CEO of the American Red Cross of the Central Coast. “Since January 2015, we have worked with many partners to visit and educate over 700 homes and install nearly 2,000 smoke alarms in Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz Counties but we have a lot more work to do.”

The Red Cross is asking everyone to take two simple steps that can save lives: check their existing smoke alarms and practice fire drills at home. There are several things families and individuals can do to increase their chances of surviving a fire:

• If someone doesn’t have smoke alarms, install them. At a minimum, put one on every level of the home, inside bedrooms and outside sleeping areas. Local building codes vary and there may be additional requirements where someone lives.

• If someone does have alarms, test them today. If they don’t work, replace them.

• Make sure that everyone in the family knows how to get out of every room and how to get out of the home in less than two minutes.

• Practice that plan. What’s the household’s escape time?