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Home Fire Drills: 3 Easy Steps that Could Save Your Family’s Life

Ronnie Tyler

All this month, I have been spreading the word about Home Fire Drill Day which is on October 14th, 2017. To be honest, I had never heard about Home Fire Drill Day until I was asked by Nationwide to help spread the word about it.  But when I learned more about Nationwide’s Make Safe Happen program, I thought “Duh…. our kids are practicing fire drills at school so why wouldn’t we do the same at home?”

Nationwide’s Make Safe Happen (MSH) program helps to raise awareness about home fires and to provide families with the information they’ll need if they’re ever faced with a home fire. Saturday, October 14, 2017 is Home Fire Drill Day, a day when families across the country are encouraged to practice home fire drills, ensuring that the American family, especially the kids, know what their escape plan is and are prepared in the event of a home fire.

So here are a few facts that immediately sold me on the mission of Home Fire Drill Day:

  • Home fires are the biggest disaster threat facing American families today, yet only approximately half of parents surveyed (55 percent) said their children know what to do in the event of a home fire (Nationwide).
  • In fact, 9 in 10 structure fires actually occur in the home (National Fire Protection Association), and more than 8 in 10 fire-related deaths result from home fires (Safe Kids Worldwide).
  • In 2015, one home fire was reported every 86 seconds (NFPA).

When you hear or read facts like that, it makes you want to start doing home fire drills with your family immediately.  Thank goodness that Nationwide and their partner’s (Nationwide Children’s Hospital, National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), and the American Red Cross (ARC)) provide so many great resources to conduct home fire drills on the site, HomeFireDrillDay.com.

I’m not going to repeat the steps here when Nationwide has them listed nicely on the site where they also provide:

So, what I do want to share is how I used the information to start doing home fire drills with my family. Yes, that’s right.  I already started.  After hearing those statistics, I could not wait until Home Fire Drill Day.

First, I appointed my youngest daughter as our fire marshal.  She and I looked at the site together and pulled together all the information that we wanted to share with our family about home fire drills.

Our youngest daughter has been appointed the fire marshal. She will help plan our home fire drills.

My middle daughter also created the escape plan and we identified a safety spot together. Then, we simply followed the 3 steps provided by Make Safe Happen.

Home Fire Drill Day is October 14, 2017. Here is our escape plan.
I’m testing our fire alarms as a part of our home fire drill.

The results were just as I expected.

  1. My other girls are now excited about being appointed the fire marshal for future fire drills.
  2. We had a lot of fun practicing the home fire drill.
  3. I feel more confident that my kids will know what to do if we had a fire at home.
  4. My husband is super competitive and turned this into a competition….which made it even more fun.

So now that we have practiced our home fire drill, what are we going to do on Home Fire Drill Day?

I have already talked to my middle daughter and she is going to execute a nighttime fire drill for the family…because we need to know how to navigate our escape plan in the dark.

BMWK Family – Let us know in the comments below if you already practice home fire drills with your family or if you plan to start practicing them.

Disclosure: This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Nationwide Insurance. The opinions and text are all mine.

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