DmOrtega
03-07-2005, 10:05 AM
The Fire Alarm Blared, But They Didn't Wake Up
March 2, 2005
By Molly Shen
BELLEVUE - Picture this:
The fire alarm is blaring. Your house is filling with smoke.
And your children are sound asleep.
It's a very real scenario.
On a recent night in their Bellevue home, 11-year-old Trenton and 13-year-old Keegan were sleeping soundly.
What happened next should have send them shooting out of bed.
Smoke detectors hanging right over them started blaring. Trenton woke up. But Keegan just waved his arm a couple times, covered his ears and rolled deeper into bed.
This could be deadly.
Afterwards, his mother Debbie Nagasawa told us, "It's pretty scary. It makes you think what you're going to have to do if there is really a fire."
We've reported this problem before. In February of 2003, we ran a similar test, setting off smoke detectors in two homes. The alarm woke an 8-year-old girl. She even sat up, but then dropped back to sleep as harmless movie smoke filled her room.
"I was panicked," her mother told us. "I was truly panicked even though I knew it wasn't a real fire."
Dr. Sarah Stolz is a pediatric sleep expert with Swedish Medical Center. She said children aren't supposed to wake up to household noises at night.
"The garbage grinder, the vacuum cleaner, who knows what. So they're used to tuning all that out," Dr. Stolz says. "So the smoke detector may not have any particular meaning to them."
After our first story, and others across the country, the Consumer Product Safety Commission launched a study on the effectiveness of smoke alarms.
The feds concluded that the alarms most of us use do not reliably wake children. So they want to study whether alternative cues, like a smoke detector with a light, a different sounding alarm, or even a parent's recorded voice urging the children to wake up would be more effective.
A company called Kid Smart just released a smoke detector that uses a parent's voice to wake children. We asked Keegan's dad to make the recording.
"Keegan, Trenton, wake up! There's a fire!" he said into the detector.
http://www.komotv.com/news/images/smoke_alarm_030205.jpg
We put Keegan to the test again.
This time, he was up immediately and out of bed. He was still very groggy and not quite sure what got him up.
"My dad's voice," he said. "He just said wake up, there's a fire? Or something?"
Keegan's experience mirrors a study by Victoria University in Australia. Researchers tested a number of smoke detectors and found that only the mother's recorded voice woke 10 out of 10 children in the study.
But still, parents should not count on their children to wake up.
"I think they sleep really deep, so if there is a fire, we're going to have to go get them," says Debbie Nagasawa. "Or we're going to have to send firemen up to get them because they're not going to save themselves."
There's no question smoke detectors save lives. But when you map out a fire escape plan, you must consider the possibility that your children will sleep through the alarm.
For More Information:
If you'd like to read the Consumer Product Safety Commission report, go to www.cpsc.gov. (Adobe Acrobat document)
For more information on the KidSmart smoke alarm -- www.kidsmartcorp.com
For the Victoria University study -- www.vu.edu.au
March 2, 2005
By Molly Shen
BELLEVUE - Picture this:
The fire alarm is blaring. Your house is filling with smoke.
And your children are sound asleep.
It's a very real scenario.
On a recent night in their Bellevue home, 11-year-old Trenton and 13-year-old Keegan were sleeping soundly.
What happened next should have send them shooting out of bed.
Smoke detectors hanging right over them started blaring. Trenton woke up. But Keegan just waved his arm a couple times, covered his ears and rolled deeper into bed.
This could be deadly.
Afterwards, his mother Debbie Nagasawa told us, "It's pretty scary. It makes you think what you're going to have to do if there is really a fire."
We've reported this problem before. In February of 2003, we ran a similar test, setting off smoke detectors in two homes. The alarm woke an 8-year-old girl. She even sat up, but then dropped back to sleep as harmless movie smoke filled her room.
"I was panicked," her mother told us. "I was truly panicked even though I knew it wasn't a real fire."
Dr. Sarah Stolz is a pediatric sleep expert with Swedish Medical Center. She said children aren't supposed to wake up to household noises at night.
"The garbage grinder, the vacuum cleaner, who knows what. So they're used to tuning all that out," Dr. Stolz says. "So the smoke detector may not have any particular meaning to them."
After our first story, and others across the country, the Consumer Product Safety Commission launched a study on the effectiveness of smoke alarms.
The feds concluded that the alarms most of us use do not reliably wake children. So they want to study whether alternative cues, like a smoke detector with a light, a different sounding alarm, or even a parent's recorded voice urging the children to wake up would be more effective.
A company called Kid Smart just released a smoke detector that uses a parent's voice to wake children. We asked Keegan's dad to make the recording.
"Keegan, Trenton, wake up! There's a fire!" he said into the detector.
http://www.komotv.com/news/images/smoke_alarm_030205.jpg
We put Keegan to the test again.
This time, he was up immediately and out of bed. He was still very groggy and not quite sure what got him up.
"My dad's voice," he said. "He just said wake up, there's a fire? Or something?"
Keegan's experience mirrors a study by Victoria University in Australia. Researchers tested a number of smoke detectors and found that only the mother's recorded voice woke 10 out of 10 children in the study.
But still, parents should not count on their children to wake up.
"I think they sleep really deep, so if there is a fire, we're going to have to go get them," says Debbie Nagasawa. "Or we're going to have to send firemen up to get them because they're not going to save themselves."
There's no question smoke detectors save lives. But when you map out a fire escape plan, you must consider the possibility that your children will sleep through the alarm.
For More Information:
If you'd like to read the Consumer Product Safety Commission report, go to www.cpsc.gov. (Adobe Acrobat document)
For more information on the KidSmart smoke alarm -- www.kidsmartcorp.com
For the Victoria University study -- www.vu.edu.au