Following a January fire that lead to the death of a Main Street man, the township fire department canvassed neighboring homes to make sure residents had working smoke alarms.
Fire Chief Wade Houlihan said the step is taken after every significant blaze.
“We do an after-the-fire program … which is when we hit a neighborhood,” he explained. “A lot of the (department) shift that responded to that fire – or members that go into the neighborhood around where the fire (happened) – inspect current smoke alarms if folks have them, or we install free smoke detectors just to make sure everyone has them.”
Firefighters installed about 20 devices throughout 60 houses near the scene of the fatal fire. Some of the smoke alarms were installed in homes that already had them, but Houlihan noted there should be about one smoke alarm for each floor in a house.
“For example, if someone has one on the first floor in their kitchen area but they don’t have anything in their living space, we’ll install that,” he said.
The department left door hangers at homes where residents weren’t home during the check. Houlihan pointed out that the visits were even more important after the Jan. 31 blaze, because nearby neighbors reported not hearing a smoke alarm from the affected residence.
” … There was a report from the neighbors that there was no evidence of any kind of fire alarm or any kind of smoke alarms that they had heard,” Houlihan noted. ” … You can usually hear the smoke alarms, obviously, when there’s a fire. And the first reports were that there weren’t fire alarms.”
Houlihan said there were some alarms in the home, but because of fire damage, the department couldn’t tell post-fire if they were working or not.
The department was dispatched to the Main Street home at 10:15 p.m. and had the fire under control in about two hours, with about 40 responding firefighters. Houlihan said the reason for the higher number were extreme weather conditions, specifically ice and snow.
“It all depends on the incident,” he said of dispatching extra firefighters. “We don’t automatically do it, but in this case here, when we needed additional support, we have access issues. Snow causes access issues with our slip and falls … If you see photos of that night, you’ll see trees covered in icicles because of the water that’s misting out of the hose line. It’s just any extreme temperature.”
The last time someone died in a township house fire was in December 2024 on Severn Avenue.
