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During the holidays, residents are more likely to light candles, use their fireplaces, plug in extension cords for decorations and cook large family meals. With the excitement of the holiday spirit, “sometimes safety gets overlooked,” said Menlo Park Fire Protection District Fire Marshal Jon Johnston.
The statistics for home fires are higher around the holidays with so many open heat sources and fire risks in the home. According to the National Fire Protection Association, electrical distribution and lighting equipment was involved in 41% of home Christmas tree fires and 40% of them started in living rooms. Home fires started by candles increased from 32% year-round to 46% in December and 20% of decoration fires started from cooking.
Menlo Park Fire hosted a live fire demonstration, showing how quickly fire can spread in a room where a lithium ion battery is placed too close to a heat source on Thursday, Dec. 19, at its Live Fire Training Center in Menlo Park. In just two minutes, an entire room can go up into flames and civilians can quickly be overcome by the toxic smoke and fire, said Johnston.
“That’s why it’s important to have working smoke detectors, maybe fire sprinklers in your home, but also just making sure that you’re having safe practices with batteries or other heat sources,” he added.
With more holiday cooking in December, grease fires are also a common occurrence. The number one advice from Menlo Park Fire is to never put water on heated oil and the best way to put out flames is to snuff it out and turn off the heat on the stove.
Menlo Park Fire’s demonstration showed that flames from a grease fire can reach several feet tall.
A badly maintained Christmas tree is another fire risk during the holidays. When a dry tree catches a flame from a nearby heat source, it will ignite a lot quicker than a well watered and maintained tree, said Johnston. A blazing Christmas tree can rapidly spread to other items in a room, leading to a house fire.
On average it takes a fire department to arrive on the scene in six minutes plus additional time to deploy the hose, but it only takes two to three minutes for a fire to go up into flames. This is why “it’s important to practice fire safety so that the fire department does not have to arrive at your holiday festivities,” Johnston said.
For more fire safety tips during the holidays, visit nfpa.org.
