On the first Monday of the month for a while I’ll post a chapter from the book. If you love what you see here, you can get 100 more very much like it by picking the book up on Amazon.
Practice with Fire Extinguishers
How would you like to exponentially improve your family’s fire safety for twenty dollars and half an hour?
That was a rhetorical question. Of course you would. Here’s how to do it, with a method I use at my house. As far as I’ve been able to tell, this is a Jason Brick Original, but it’s possible I heard it sometime long ago and just forgot.
This method solves a serious problem of fire safety. Most safe homes have a fire extinguisher, maybe several. It’s a smart and inexpensive tool to add to any house. But also, most homes with fire extinguishers are equipped with exactly zero people who have used one in the past few years.
Fire extinguishers are built for ease of use, but when you’re trying to put out a fire is not the time to be looking up instructions on YouTube.
My uncle, a career Marine Force Recon soldier, has a saying: “A plan you don’t rehearse isn’t a plan. It’s a hope.” Which means, if we want those fire extinguishers to do us any good, we need to train and practice with them. Here’s how we do that in my home.
Once each year, usually just before the Fourth of July, I buy a new fire extinguisher. In our house, we have three. None of them are fancy. They’re just the $20 models you can get at Home Depot. We replace the oldest extinguisher in the house with the new one.
The old one we take into the back yard. On the patio, we build a small campfire. We put on gloves and goggles, and everybody in the house takes turns putting out the fire.
Even when my children were very young, they did it with the help of an adult. Now that the youngest is a teenager, everybody in the house is rated for basic fire extinguisher use.
As a bonus, we also get to practice basic fire building, which can be lifesaving in a wilderness situation and just convenient during family camping trips.
It takes about thirty minutes from start to finish. It teaches important safety skills to my family. It’s fun, especially for the young ones, but also for adults. Because something’s on fire, there’s even a little pressure testing and adrenaline, especially for the younger kids doing it the first few times.
I encourage you to steal this and put it to work for your family. We do it just before July 4th because of fireworks and camping, but any time is a good time.
A Quick Review
If you’ve never been formally trained on how to use a home fire extinguisher, there are two sets of information you need to learn.
The first is what kind of fire extinguisher to have and use. Extinguishers are rated on a letter system, with different letters corresponding to different kinds of fires:
· Class A extinguishers put out regular fires from wood, paper, carpet, etc.
· Class B extinguishers put out flammable liquid fires, like burning oil or gasoline.
· Class C extinguishers put out electrical fires.
· Class D extinguishers put out flammable metals like sodium or magnesium.
· Class K extinguishers put out oil and grease fires.
Your typical home fire extinguisher is rated A, B, and C. That means it puts out any fire you’re likely to have at home, except for cooking fires involving oil and grease. For those, you don’t want the pressure from a fire extinguisher anyway. Dump some salt on it, or contain it with a lid. For the rest, that Home Depot extinguisher does the trick.
The second set of information is how to use the extinguisher.
For fires smaller than a beach ball, grab your extinguisher. Stand six to eight feet away (between two and four paces). Remember the acronym PASS:
· Pull the pin out of the extinguisher, just like the guy did with a grenade in the last war movie you watched.
· Aim the extinguisher at the base of the fire. Flames feed from fuel, so you’re going to douse the fuel.
· Squeeze the trigger to get the extinguisher going.
· Sweep the flow across the base of the fire to put out all fuel.
If the extinguisher runs out before the fire is gone, or if the fire spreads to larger than a beach ball, evacuate and call the fire department.
If you successfully put out the fire, evacuate and call the fire department. The air inside will be full of toxic fumes, and the professionals will check for hot spots to make sure everything is extinguished.
I’d also encourage you to watch one of the dozens of great YouTube videos on fire extinguisher use before you do your first training. Reading is good, but seeing is better.