The death rate for house fires in homes without working smoke alarms is more than twice as high as in homes with functioning alarms.
Three children died in Rockford over the weekend from a house fire; another blaze recently displaced several families in Elgin. There tends to be an uptick in home fires during winter.
That's why the Elgin Fire Department is working to change the statistics through fire prevention outreach.
They’re canvassing neighborhoods to inspect and replace smoke detectors; in one trip, the department found only a fourth of residents' detectors were working and functional.
Elgin’s Fire Chief Dave Schmidt says the department comes across common trends with home smoke detectors.
“The battery’s getting low, so it starts to chirp. They may not have a battery; they don’t want to listen to it chirp, so they take it off the ceiling to pull the battery," he says. "And they have every good intention of getting a battery and putting it back in and, for whatever reason, it gets put in a pile of things or it gets disposed of.”
Schmidt says people may adopt the “it won’t be me” mindset and, in turn, become less proactive toward smoke-detector maintenance.
“Unfortunately, there’s a little bit of that apathy, just because the odds of having a fire – they’re not tremendous," Schmidt said. "But when it does happen, it typically catches people off guard."
He says smoke detectors should be checked monthly by holding the button for several seconds and to listen for a sound.