The MB Interview:

Meri-K Appy,
President of the Home Safety Council

 

About Meri-K Appy

Meri-K Appy is President of the Washington, DC-based Home Safety Council (HSC), the only national organization solely dedicated to preventing the nearly 20,000 deaths and 21 million medical visits that result each year in America from unintentional home injuries. Since joining HSC in 2003 Appy has spearheaded creation of the Home Safety Council Expert Network, offering free materials and resources to the fire and life safety education community, and the new Home Safety Literacy Project, a unique outreach program designed to teach adults with low literacy skills about basic home fire safety and disaster preparedness practices. In 2009, HSC will release Start Safe: A Fire and Burn Safety Program for Preschoolers and Their Families with funding the U.S. Department of Homeland Security/FEMA. A national media safety spokesperson, Appy is a frequent guest on NBC's TODAY Show and has also appeared on every major network including the Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, the EARLY SHOW on CBS, ABC's GOOD MORNING AMERICA, and HGTV. Appy received the Mason Lankford Fire Service Leadership Award from the Congressional Fire Services Institute in recognition of her years of service to the field of fire and life safety education and was named the 2006 Sprinkler Advocate of the Year by the American Fire Sprinkler Association.

 

MKA: Yes, children can be taught fire is dangerous, but we have to teach them in the right way for the right age child. A very young child doesn't understand conceptually the power of the match. Cognitively it's just not something they can understand. So the answer is to prevent access to matches and lighters, and start at the beginning of the story to teach them things they can understand and add more information a little at a time as they grow and develop. The problem is, in our country, there isn't enough sustained fire safety and life safety education to tell the story in the right way. Fire services are going into the schools, certainly, but based on a national study the Home Safety Council did a few years back with Johns Hopkins, we know there are only 12% of US fire departments who have somebody assigned full time to fire and life safety education. What this suggests to me is, while there may be many heartfelt attempts to educate the community, there are an awful lot of folks out there we need to get our message to and we need a lot of help.

We need to seek partners in the community who are in the best position to reach our target audiences. For children, this means working with the schools in a very comprehensive way. This gives us the benefit of wonderful teachers there on the ground, working with the students, day in and day out. They can address these issues over time, and take advantage of "teachable moments" as they arise. Unfortunately, these strong school-based partnerships are hard to manage with the limited resources most fire departments have, so most kids aren't getting the kind of safety education they need. Now, when you pair that with research of what their parents do not know, it's no wonder there are as many unintentional home injuries and deaths as there are in our county. Many adults in our country lack a basic awareness about what fire can do. They don't understand how quickly a fire can grow from first ignition to flashover- they don't know it can take as little as 3 minutes. They don't know that their children may not wake up from the smoke alarms even if they have them. We have to face facts: if children are to survive a home fire, they're going to need a grown-up to help. We can't rely on the children themselves because they may not even wake up. There's so much more we need to do on all levels to educate.

Within this question, lies a much bigger problem: we're just not doing enough in a sustained way to help people understand the true nature of fire and prepare them to prevent and respond to it well. We need to rally an army of allies, engaging more people in different arenas to deliver our lifesaving messages - it can't be the fire services alone doing that.