Fire Drills

A friend sent me a CNN video about children and smoke alarms.

Results from a Columbus Children's Hospital study using 6-12 year old subjects:

• 40% of children did not awaken to the tone alarm (using an alarm 4x louder than your standard home alarm). (what!!!)
• 96% of children awoke to the alarms that used their mothers' voices which told them to wake up and leave the room.
• 83% of children were able to escape from the room in time when awakened by the parent-voice alarm.
• Most childhood deaths in home fires are attributed to smoke inhalation.

I checked this product out on Amazon and read the three reviews associated with it.  This is one of my favorite quotes (from a reviewer who gave the product 3 out of 5 stars):

"I was sickened to say the least to find out that none of our three children, ages 8, 6 and 3 woke up during a fire drill to the traditional alarm even though we let it beep for 2 full minutes... I love the concept, however, when we did another fire drill using the vocal smoke alarm, again none of our children woke up.  Maybe [an alarm] that sounds like a bag of chips being opened, because for some reason they will wake up to that, but not to extremely loud beeping or this particular vocal alarm."

You gotta love and respect the honest review from a proud parent.

On a more serious note: I'm doing a fire drill with Sebastian tonight.... wait... tomorrow night.  That way his teachers won't suffer for the sake of safety.  I'll keep you posted on the results.