Reply To: Smoke alarm expiry

[John Wilson]

Dana, I sort of did that earlier this year. I added a letter to EVERY tax bill — about 2700 of them. I got 4 phone calls – 3 for alarm checks and 1 for an inspection on a 4 unit residential building. Sure there are likely some people that took the advice and checked — there’s not really any way to know those stats but I’d figured I’d have WAY more than 4 phone calls.

The targeting specific ages of houses is a neat idea rather than neighbourhoods. That’s easy data for me to pull – I’m also part of the building department

This year I had the guys go back to the same neighbourhood as last year but I gave them only the addresses that we didn’t get response from the year before. 244 door knocks, 129 homes entered, 42 alarms given (13 no CO, 15 no SA, 23 expired SA) and 28 batteries replaced.

In 13 years of stats, we’ve knocked on 3745 doors, entered 2321 homes and given out 719 alarms and 428 batteries for an average of 31% of homes without proper detection. Yikes. One of every 3 homes not properly protected is pretty alarming (yes, pun intended) That’s only stats from during our alarm blitz with the suppression guys. It doesn’t count what the Chief and I do during the day when we get requests for help.

We’ve only got 2700 properties (total of all property types) with about 1600 single family dwellings. You would think that after being in 2300 homes, we should have edjumicated everyone by now but apparently not….