Fire Safety Summer School

PRLog (Press Release) – Jun 09, 2008 – Retired Battalion Chief Robert Avsec has spent the better part of the past 30 years teaching children and adults how to protect themselves from death and injury at the hands of fire.  Now he "sounds an alarm" for fire safety and children that should resonate with all parents.

"We need to teach our children fire safety responsibility.  Nobody else is going to do it for us," says Avsec, a former battalion chief with the Chesterfield Fire & EMS Department in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

"At the schools our children attend, the teachers and administrators are already overwhelmed with mandated programs and underfunded for the programs they must deliver, so your children probably won't get it there.  Your local fire department?  Probably not going to happen," according to Avsec.

"Even the best departments—and I worked for one of the best—only devote a small fraction of their total budget to fire safety education.  Many smaller departments—particularly volunteer staffed fire departments—do not have anyone teaching fire safety education," says the former firefighter and author of the blog, The FireSafetyProtectionPro, http://www.firesafetyprotectionpro.com.

Said Avsec, "And that was before diesel fuel cost almost $5 a gallon (most modern fire trucks run on diesel fuel).  Public education programs are among the first programs that fire departments cut when budget dollars or donations become scarce."

"I began my blog to give the fire safety conversation in this country a boost.  Fire has too great an impact on everyone, but young people especially.  We teach our children how to drive a car, but we expect someone else to teach them how not to die or become horribly injured by something that's around them every day, fire," according to Chief Avsec.  "In my blog I'm challenging all parents--and giving them the resource links--to take this summer and conduct their own Fire Safety Summer School so that their children get the knowledge and develop the skills to stay fire safe."

The FireSafetyProtectionPro