Fire Safety Briefing

In elementary school had a firefighter visit our classroom each year to talk about fire safety. He'd cover stop, drop, and roll, then go into how to operate a fire extinguisher, say that we should get down low to leave a house on fire, and he's always end with how to check batteries in your smoke detector. Even as a third grader I thought it odd he took up battery checking with us instead of our parents, but I suppose he knew he had a captive audience and that if he scared us enough we'd make sure our parents did it. I know I did. But my parents said we didn't need to check our batteries since all the smoke detectors were hardwired. A full year later during the fire safety talk, I told our firefighter friend that I didn't need to worry about checking the batteries because the smoke detectors were wired. He said, "That's great, but if you have an electrical fire, you might never wake up when your house burns down." Important safety tip for all the fourth graders out there.