While several of its personnel today continued the inspection of the 135 buildings in the city that exceed ten floors, those responsible for the Fire Prevention and Extinction and Rescue Service (SPEIS) of Alicante wanted to disseminate some of their requests to the public administration and basic advice to citizens, which according to their experience we must take into account when facing events such as the tragic fire in Camapanar, in Valencia.
To begin with, the Alicante firefighters remember that in 2021 152 people died, almost three a week, in Spain due to a house fire. For this reason, “we have been reporting for years about the need for a change in state regulations to, at least, oblige newly built homes to have smoke detectors installed, as is already happening in other European countries.”
The SPEIS experts also advocate the dissemination of “powerful advertising campaigns, like the one carried out years ago by the DGT and the Ministry of the Interior.” They remember that in 1990, given the shocking data that in Spain “one person died on the road every hour and a half, 17 people a day, 5,940 people a year”, the General Directorate of Traffic promoted two fundamental actions to raise awareness among Spanish society: An update of traffic laws and the campaign “Recklessness pays… more and more.”
“The impact of the campaign was brutal,” they say, “the campaign resonated with people and traffic accident deaths decreased dramatically. Thanks to these campaigns, not wearing a seat belt became unthinkable.”
Firefighters believe that the continuity of these campaigns has been effective, and that the Ministry of the Interior should opt for something similar to inform citizens “of the importance of using smoke detectors and what to do in the event of a fire.” According to them, “in the United Kingdom and New Zealand they have been doing this for years. The latest campaign is aimed at verifying that the detectors work. It is assumed that everyone already has detectors installed in their homes.”
Along these lines, they propose a first objective to achieve: that all homes have a smoke detector installed. “For less than 15 euros there are some with a battery that lasts 10 years. With this small gesture, countless lives would be saved,” they say.
One fact to keep in mind is that “we are about nine times more likely to die from a fire if we do not have a smoke detector installed in our home.”
There is another second objective that experts believe is basic: “to make people aware of the importance of closing the door to fire, for ourselves and for our neighbors.” There are three circumstances that, they explain, can occur in a fire: the first, there is a fire in my home and I can escape; what I do? “I take the keys, I leave the house, closing the doors as I go so that the smoke does not spread through the building and I call 112.” The second possibility is that there is a fire in my home and I cannot escape: “I go to the room furthest from the fire, closing the doors as I go and ask for help at 112, informing where we are.”
The third situation, fire in another home: “Not something in the house, I cover the smoke entrances (door cracks, sockets…) with wet towels, and I go to the place furthest from the smoke, closing the doors as I go and I ask for help at 112 and inform them where we are. And they insist: “I do not leave the house, we want to emphasize the importance of not leaving the house, even if the Police tell us to do so. In a fire, there is no 0 risk, but in a fire even in our home, locking oneself in a room is a much better option than going out into a smoky space.
The Alicante firefighters, in fact, are collaborating with the Alicante Local Police “so that they know what to do when they arrive at the fires before us. In almost all cases, buildings should not be evacuated, and it is a problem with which we are often encountering.
