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Bob:
Joining us this morning is Pat Brown from the Holt Diamond Dale agency, Pat. It’s good to see you always, and around this time every year you come you come on and you remind us of the importance to prepare, especially as it starts to get a little colder and so I’m hoping he can do that this morning again.
Pat:
Yeah, Bob thanks it’s always nice to see you too, even from from afar.
As a former firefighter and fire investigator I investigated a lot of fires and we were able to pinpoint certain things that would happen during certain times of the year. And as we start to button up our homes, put everything away, there are certain safety tips that we probably should just consider on an annual basis.
Number one, people are starting to use their fireplaces. If they have a wood fireplace and it’s time to put the you know the wood in there…let’s have a fire…they need to be checked, they need to be cleaned, they need to be looked at to see if the creosote has not built up in there. Many, many many times we’ve had chimney fires that people just fail to have them cleaned.
The other one is if you have a gas operated with make sure you have great ventilation. Because when we button up our houses the houses today are really really tight and you still have to have some of that, that ventilation, that makeup air to, to make them operate so just get them checked.
Give yourself a furnace checkup or get somebody to check it out for you. Furnace filters, burners, people that are on propane, sometimes their burners will, because there’s a lot of moisture in it, and they produce a lot of carbon monoxide, and they should have that checked.
Generators. I know people are getting their generators out and, you know, making sure that it that it works, making sure that you change your spark plugs making sure you get fresh gas, we’ll talk a little bit more about generators in a minute. But clean out your gutters, you know, now’s a good time to start working on your gutters, for insurance purposes, for ice damming that might happen down the road…oh my goodness I forgot to to clean the gutters and next thing you know is I have ice damming, we have water damage in the house.
And I can never leave this without having smoke alarm checks, make sure your smoke alarms are ready to go. Make sure your carbon monoxide detectors operate. And your fire extinguishers, that you have one that’s not tucked underneath the sink.
The biggest one is have a plan. Yeah, if something happens, have a plan to get out, practice.
Bob:
Real quick, are generators dangerous.
Pat:
They can be. Many people say, well you know what we got a generator. Let’s turn it on, and they fail to get oxygen or air into it, to have ventilation. They’ll put it in the garage and keep one of the doors open a little bit, and you still can get a lot of carbon monoxide that can come into the house, just like a fire running inside the garage.
