Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
For new construction, codes require that all smoke detectors are of the new type that are
hardwired to communicate with each other. That way, if one smoke detector goes off, they all
go off. Since there may be only a matter of a few minutes of time to escape a fire once it has
grown to the point where it trips a smoke detector, the new interconnected systems improve the
chances that everyone in the home will escape safely. For retrofit situations, you can purchase
smoke detectors that use a wireless interconnect to communicate with each other. In the case of
either wireless or hardwired intercommunicating smoke detectors, the detectors may be of dif-
ferent types (ionization or photoelectric types, combination CO and smoke detecting, etc.) as
long as all detectors are made by the same manufacturer and designed to communicate with
each other. When retrofitting rooms for smoke detectors, in most cases the units will operate
solely from batteries.
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In October 1993, when a vicious wildfire broke out in Laguna Beach, a southern California beach town, firefighter John
Henderson was called down from his home in the Sierras of northern California to fight this blaze. The combination
of extremely dangerous fire conditions, brought on by three consecutive drought years coupled with 60 to 70 mph hot
and dry Santa Ana winds, quickly whipped the fire into an unstoppable conflagration, burning hundreds of homes to the
ground! When John rounded a corner on the Pacific Coast Highway, just north of Laguna Beach, he saw a sight that
he will never forget. He and his partner watched the firestorm rush down the dry hills toward the ocean. The heat of the
firestorm was so intense that, even after blowing across four lanes of pavement, it was hot enough to ignite a mile-long
stretch of wooden telephone poles on the ocean side of the road. From a distance, he said they looked like a string of
matchsticks stuck in the sand, igniting one after the other until there were perhaps a hundred telephone poles burning
at once.
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You may find it hard to believe, but children will often sleep through the screech of a
smoke detector alarm. Statistical tests show that more children will respond to their parent's
voices than to the screech of a smoke detector. Make sure you train your children to both recog-
nize and respond to a smoke detector alarm, but also remember to add your own voice to that
alarm when confronted by a real-life situation!
Be sure to change your smoke detector batteries, and test their function, at least once a
year. An easy way to remember this is to get in the habit of changing smoke detector batteries,
and testing their function, on the same time each year, such as when you set the clocks back at
the end of Daylight Saving Time every fall. Locate the manual “test” button on the outside of
your smoke detector. It may be simply a small raised area in the housing with a slot around it
and the word “test” printed on that part of the housing. Push this flexible button and listen for
an ear-piercing audible alarm.
