Having and practicing a home fire escape plan is essential for all families and households. When you have kids, they need to know what to do if there is a fire. If they don’t, they are significantly more likely to be harmed in the fire.
According to the U.S. Fire Administration, 374,300 residential fires happened in 2022. Out of these fires, 2,720 people lost their lives. Home escape plans are often an overlooked aspect of home safety. Hundreds of dollars are spent on the most updated security cameras, reinforced doorways, and motion detectors on every corner of the home. Unfortunately, those same people don’t see the necessity of a fire escape plan. This plan could mean the difference between life and death if a fire emergency occurs in the home.
In Georgia there is a fire death about every 3 days and a fire injury every 6 hours. Furthermore, children under the age of five are 2 times as likely to die in a fire than an adult. This can be prevented through precautionary steps, such as creating and implementing a home fire escape plan. This article will cover the essential steps to creating an effective home escape plan for you and your family or household. Creating a home escape plan is an important part of our Fire Safety Class. Sign up for our Fire Safety course if you would like to learn more about escape places and other fire emergency preparedness.
There are Three Essential Steps to Implementing a Home Fire Escape plan:
Create the Home Escape Plan
Begin by drawing a basic layout of your home. An iPad or tablet can be helpful as you draw this plan. Find two exits in each room and highlight those in your drawing. A window and a door act as two exits. Decide on a stationary meeting place for evacuation, but make sure the meeting place is away from the street. Assign certain age-appropriate responsibilities, such as evacuating pets, corralling younger siblings, grabbing a fire extinguisher, or dialing 911. Assess the ability of each recipient to ensure proper execution of responsibilities. The RACE acronym helps you to assign responsibilities. This stands for Rescue, Alarm/Call 911, Contain, and Evacuate/Extinguish. All of these steps should be done ideally at the same time, so divide and conquer. Learn more about the RACE steps here.
Prepare for the Home Escape Plan
You may not have everything you need to evacuate effectively and may need to purchase fire emergency equipment such as fire extinguishers, escape ladders, fire blankets, fire rated boxes, etc. An escape ladder is a big one for evacuation plans because to rely on a window for your two ways out of every room—assuming it is a more than 1 story window—you must have the means to get out the window safely. So you may need multiple escape ladders but at least one to be kept upstairs. Don’t buy one and put it in the garage. That won’t be very helpful.
This is just scratching the surface of what fire safety tools you need for your home. View our complete home fire safety equipment checklist and buyers guide here.
Discuss the Home Escape Plan
Everyone in your family or household must know routes of evacuation, locations of fire extinguishers, how to use an escape ladder, etc. Ask each family member what their specific responsibility is during a fire and what exits they will take. Most fatal fires happen between 8pm and 8am and peak between 12 AM and 5 AM, so discuss the plan as if your family wakes up to a fire. What are the first steps they take? Have your children communicate the plan back to you once the entire plan and responsibilities have been discussed. This step is crucial to ensure everyone has retained the information given during your discussion.
If the fire is still small and contained, you would want to use a fire extinguisher, so talk about the PASS method for using a fire extinguisher with your family.
Pull the pin
Aim at the base of the fire
Squeeze the handle
Sweep from side to side
Many people don’t know how to use an extinguisher properly and where it is, so familiarizing yourself with its location and proper use is very helpful.
To know you need to evacuate, you need to have working smoke alarms throughout your home. Learn about what smoke alarms to purchase here.
Importance of Discussion and Planning With Kids
Kids will do what feels familiar, most likely. Meaning during a real fire, if they are familiar with what to do, they will do it as practice. However, if they aren’t familiar with what to do they may get out on their own and go to their friend’s house or something else that feels safe. This would result in unaccounted for children.
A key part of a successful evacuation is not just getting out, but knowing who got out. This helps you accurately communicate to the fire department who is and isn’t missing so they can take the correct action.
Make sure to predetermine your safe meeting place and practice that during your home fire drill.
Practice the Home Escape Plan
Once the plans have been created and discussed, it’s time to practice! This step will be the most fun for your family, so get creative with it! Print out flames and place them on the wall throughout the house. Block certain routes of evacuation to challenge everyone’s ability to adapt on the fly. Signal the start of the fire by playing an alarm sound from a bluetooth speaker or setting off a smoke detector with artificial smoke or a candle. Setting off the actual smoke detector can be a great way to practice with the actual noise they can expect in a real fire.
Show your children how to use the escape ladder safely by putting it on the windowsill and climbing out of the window and onto the ladder. Ensure everyone arrives at the predetermined meeting place safely. Run through the plan a few times with different obstacles in each drill. Bring everybody together after each drill and talk about what went right then wrong and what changes need to be made for the next drill.
Set a goal for everyone to be out of the house in less than 3 minutes. Once you reach this goal, congratulations! You have successfully created and implemented a home fire escape plan. You and your family can now rely on that plan if a fire emergency ever occurs. Remember to practice it periodically to ensure it stays fresh on everyone’s mind.
Continue Learning About Fire Safety
To learn more about fire safety, check out our additional fire safety resources or sign up for a fire safety class online or in person here. You can also host a fire safety training for a group and we will come to your facility anywhere across Georgia or South Carolina.
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