Teaming up to promote fire safety in Long Beach

Long Beach City Council members, CSEA members and city officials will join volunteers from the American Red Cross on Saturday, April 13 with one goal in mind: safety.

The volunteers will be installing free smoke alarms in Long Beach residents’ homes as part of the Red Cross Home Fire Campaign, which started at 10 years ago. The campaign is a national program, so any place in the country can call the Red Cross, and can request for our volunteers to come out and do an in-home fire safety education visit as well as installing free smoke alarms in their homes. The program usually targets a lot of high-risk neighborhoods.

“If you have a working smoke alarm, you reduce your risk of death and injury by 50 percent,” said Joe Spaccarelli, the campaign’s program director. “It truly is a lifesaving program. A lot of homes don’t have working smoke alarms, so there’s a lot of risk there for those families.”

It is an all-hands-on deck event. City Council members and volunteers will be working side by side with the American Red Cross, visiting homes that need smoke alarms and helping to perform the installations of free smoke alarms for residents.

“We know that smoke alarms save lives.  By partnering with the Red Cross for this important event, we are helping Long Beach residents to stay safe and educating our community about home fire safety,” City Council President Brendan Finn said. “We are grateful for the opportunity to team up with the Red Cross on this free and potentially lifesaving program that we are thrilled to bring to Long Beach, making a meaningful impact on our residents.”

The program is free and starts at Long Beach City Hall, 1 W.

Chester St., at 9 a.m. Residents can sign up for the free program by visiting SoundTheAlarm.org/li or by calling (877) 733-2767.

For anybody who calls about the program, the Red Cross will send a team of three people, a documenter, an educator and an installer. They’ll do an assessment, hang the new alarms and teach the residents about fire safety, having an escape plan, getting out in less than two minutes and having a meeting point. They’ll also teach them about the hush button on the alarms, which many people don’t know about, according to Spaccarelli.

He said while people are cooking and their alarms are going off, a lot of people take it down, take the batteries out, forget about it and don’t put it back. So, as part of the program, they teach about the hush button that people can to silence the alarm, but will keep them active.

“There’s nothing more important than the health and safety of our residents,” City Manager Daniel Creighton said. “This free program is a chance to educate the community about home fire safety and make sure every resident who needs smoke detectors installed in their home can get them. We are thankful to our CSEA volunteers who always go above and beyond for our Long Beach residents.”