As Winter Sets In, Concerns Grow About Fires From Heating Sources [The Hartford Courant, Conn.]

Dec. 31--The early-morning Christmas fire that killed three children and their grandparents in Stamford was the deadliest blaze in a single-family home in decades in Connecticut, a grim marker for a time of year when house fires spike as people try to stay warm.

"Between the holidays, and mid- to late February is the prime time for house fires everywhere in the nation, and Connecticut is no exception," said Alan Zygmunt, public fire and life safety coordinator at the state Commission on Fire Prevention and Control and the Connecticut Fire Academy in Windsor Locks.

The Stamford fire that consumed a $1.7 million Victorian home overlooking Long Island Sound was started by embers that were carried out of a fireplace to a mudroom or an adjacent trash enclosure at the rear of the house.

Fire experts said it's uncommon for fireplace embers to spark deadly fires, which are more often caused by cigarettes or various heating sources, such as electric space heaters -- or even from creosote in the chimney -- rather than smoldering coals on the hearth.

A sluggish economy and an on-again-off-again aversion to oil, however, have led many in Connecticut to use alternative sources of heat, such as fireplaces, wood stoves and pellet furnaces.

"In today's society with alternative heating devices being one of the main things that we look at, people are trying to save money in any way that they can," Zygmunt said of wood stoves, fireplaces, wood-pellet furnaces and other secondary heat sources. "So, they're using them more often and therefore they need to be cleaned more often."

Deadly Fires

For state Fire Marshal Robert J. Ross, the loss of life in the Stamford fire brought to mind only two other major fires in Connecticut's recent history.

In February 2003, a troubled 23-year-old, Lesley Andino, lit her bed on fire at the Greenwood Health Center in Hartford. The resulting blaze killed 16 people at the nursing home.

In April 1995, Geoffrey Ferguson shot three of his tenants and two others in a home that he owned in the Fairfield County town of Redding before he lit the house on fire. Ferguson died of an apparent suicide in 2003 while serving a life sentence in prison.

Further back in the state's history, on July 6, 1944, a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus canvas circus tent -- waterproofed with a compound of gasoline and liquid paraffin -- roared with flames that killed 168 people and injured 682. That fire drastically changed fire codes related to outdoor tents and, to this day, Connecticut has some of the toughest codes in the nation regarding tents, Zygmunt said.

More recently, Connecticut had 60 fatal fires that killed 82 people from January 2006 through 2010, according to figures provided by the state Fire Marshal's Office. Only one fatal fire in 2009 involved smoldering embers -- from a wood stove, although the cause of that fire is still undetermined.

Nationally, hot embers or ash caused an average 7 percent of fires, or about 25,300 per year, for a total of $426 million in annual property damage, said Lorraine Carli of the Quincy, Mass.,-based National Fire Protection Association, which keeps fire-related statistics.

Embers or ash are the cause of 4 percent of fire-related deaths nationally each year, or 110 lives, and 3 percent of fire-related injuries, or 440 injuries, Carli said.

"These numbers reflect how the fires' heat source was listed for home structure fires on an annual average," Carli said. "Hot embers or ashes could include improperly disposed fireplace ashes as well as other things like coal, charcoal, embers coming out of a chimney that ignite a roof."

Fire Prevention

Having functioning smoke alarms in all the right places is critical to saving lives, fire officials said this week, repeating a mantra that is often heeded best after a deadly inferno.

Four in 10 of the fatal fires between 2006 and 2010 involved a home in which there was either no smoke alarm or the smoke alarm wasn't working, according to statistics provided to The Courant by the state Fire Marshal's Office. During the five-year period, 60 percent of the fatal fires were at homes with functioning smoke alarms, 32 percent were at homes with no smoke alarms and 8 percent were at homes in which the smoke alarm didn't work.

In the Stamford fire, Stamford Director of Operations Ernie Orgera said that a hard-wired smoke detection system was being set up in the home. It had not been hooked up. Fire officials have said they don't know whether the family had installed battery-operated smoke detectors.

State and national fire officials recommend having a smoke alarm in every bedroom, at least one smoke alarm on each floor of the house, including the basement, and one in every sleeping area.

Connecticut ranks as the 12th-safest state in the U.S. when it comes to home fires, with 8.9 deaths per million people as of 2008, the most recent figures available through the U.S. Fire Administration. Connecticut fares better than New York, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, but worse than every other New England state and New Jersey.

During winter months, space heaters, wood stoves and other supplemental heating sources are the leading cause of home fires. Heating equipment was involved in an estimated 66,100 reported home structure fires nationally, 480 civilian deaths, 1,660 civilian injuries, and caused direct property damage of $1.1 billion in 2008, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, according to the Insurance Information Institute. Civilian deaths are separate from firefighter deaths.

"Damage caused by fire and smoke are covered under standard homeowners and renters insurance policies," said Loretta Worters, vice president of the Insurance Information Institute. "Homeowners are also covered for water or other damage caused by firefighters working to extinguish the blaze. ... Unfortunately, many consumers do not know what is in their policy until they have to file a claim and, at that point, it is too late to purchase the right amount of financial protection."

Fireplace Caution

Ross, the state fire marshal, recommends that people be careful with the remains of heating fires. Ideally, people should wait until a fireplace fire has died down completely and then close the mesh-metal spark screen and glass doors on a fireplace if they weren't already closed.

Removing fiery ash should be done with extreme caution.

"Even though something appears to be out and appears to be cool, you absolutely cannot ever trust it," Ross said. "When you remove ash from a fireplace, wood stove, pellet stove, coal stove, any kind of alternative heating source like that, it needs to go into a metal container. It needs to be immediately removed from the structure. It needs to be soaked in water and left away from any structures."

Ross also recommends using carbon monoxide detectors. The exhaust fumes from a home heating furnace can back up if the pipe is covered in a heavy snow and fill the house with deadly gas.

"It's odorless, it's tasteless, and if you don't have a detector and your house starts to fill with CO, you're just going to drift off into a nice, quiet sleep," Ross said. "People think, 'Well, I'm a light sleeper, I'll wake if there's a fire.' Those are all myths."

For fire safety information, visit the National Fire Protection Association's website, http://www.nfpa.org, or the U.S. Fire Administration's website, http://www.usfa.fema.gov.

___

(c)2011 The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.)

Visit The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.) at www.courant.com

Distributed by MCT Information Services