The cost of living crisis is resulting in people buying cheaper chargers for their phones and increasing the risk of a fire hazard in the home, Rotarians have been told.
Rob Smith, a prevention officer for Shropshire Fire Service, also warned of overloading electrical single sockets and the danger of batteries missing from smoke alarms in the home when he spoke to a meeting of Shrewsbury Severn Rotary Club.
People smoking and falling asleep while sitting in a chair and dropping a cigarette was a serous cause of fatalities, whilst elderly people forgetting to turn a cooker off was another major problem resulting in a lot of Fire Service preventative work being carried out but half of home fires were caused by unattended cooking and nationally two fires a day were from candles – particularly with an increase in scented candles purchases – which was a consistent hazard throughout the year.
“The message with candles is if you go out of the room blow the flame out,” he told Rotarians. “But if you haven’t got a smoke alarm in the house you are four times more like to be a fatality.”
His advice: “Think about your vulnerability in the home and as a team we can come out and go through your safety plans. There is no charge for changing old for new alarms and each officer has around 32 home visits booked in a month. We are visiting a lot of vulnerable people around Shropshire.”
