Red Cross makes fire safety a priority

The door of the second-floor apartment opened, and the first thing we saw was a man in a wheelchair.

My first thought was: two minutes.

That’s all the time the experts say you have to escape when a smoke detector sounds in your home.

That warning ran through my head as my teammates from the Red Cross and I asked the man in our very limited Spanish whether he would allow us to install a free smoke alarm.

Although he spoke no English, we managed to convey enough about our purpose for him to graciously allow us to do our job.

But the whole time I was there, all I could think was: two minutes. Dos minutos.

The assignment sounded simple enough: join the Red Cross as volunteers criss-crossed Freeport last Friday to install smoke detectors in homes.

The reality: this was a tougher job than it sounded.

It was more than a language barrier that hampered us; there was a general mistrust of strangers and downright bewilderment among those we were tasked with helping.

The good news was that almost every tenant in the apartment building that opened a door to let us in already had a working smoke detector. The bad news was that they didn’t have enough. In the case of the man in the wheelchair, the apartment didn’t have any smoke detectors at all.

Forget worrying about a two-minute exit; this unit didn’t have any warning system at all.

So my teammates — Taryn Schmidt, Mark Kazemi and Margaret Sukhram — and I went to work.

At a staging area at the Freeport Fire Department earlier in the day, we were divided into teams of three or four. Then we were instructed to decide among ourselves who would handle the different jobs: the installer, who would actually put in the alarm; the documentarian, who would take down the resident’s name and address; and the educator, who would discuss fire safety with the resident.

I felt unqualified to install a smoke detector; fortunately, Mark, a National Grid employee, had attended a session earlier in the week with his colleagues to learn how to do just that task. The National Grid workers were participating in a company-wide effort to work with the Red Cross. I figured I could hold the ladder and help Mark, a Smithtown resident, in his job.