Aging Begins at 30

Take Safety Precautions Against Fires

Traveling in the holiday season you may stay in a motel. Can you survive a fire? If you burn over 20% of your skin and are over 65 you wont survive. Most deaths however are from smoke or poisonous gas inhalation and panic. Carbon monoxide causes 48% of burn fatalities. CO combined with other toxic gases or disease, burns, and heat each cause a third of the remainder. Panic comes from not knowing what to do.

Deaths from fires are the fifth leading cause of injury death among people over 65, after falls, motor vehicle crashes, suicide, and medical-surgical procedures. The elderly are 14% of the U.S. population but account for 30% of residential fire deaths. Older African Americans have fire death rates five times higher than Caucasians.

Surviving a fire begins when you get to your room. Look at the window and try to see if you can open it. Dropping from more than two floors up usually results in injury. People in three- to four-story buildings are 5 times as likely to die as those in single-story buildings. Check other escape routes. Can you get there blindfolded? Your smoke irritated eyes will be clamped shut.

Many survive a hotel fire in their room protected against smoke and gases by taking wet towels or mattresses soaked from a filled tub and putting them around the doors and cracks and keeping them wet with the ice bucket. The bathroom exhaust fan may clear your room of smoke. Have your room key handy. If the door knob is hot don’t open it. Call the operator, sound the alarm, and alert your neighbors. If you can’t leave, get fresh air by tenting your head with a blanket at a slightly open window or break it with a chair. Stay low.

Never use the elevator, it may take you to a floor with a worse fire.

In a nursing home fire no one has ever died in a facility equipped with sprinklers, available since 1978. Check for them. Fires in unlicensed boarding homes for the elderly (2 million boarders) kill about 140 nationally each year. Fatal fires in homes (70% of all fatal fires) are most likely to have been caused by smoking. About 40% of firedeath adults are legally intoxicated, but this is uncommon in the elderly. In mobile homes, nonfunctioning smoke detectors (available since 1970) are common. Heating equipment and smoking materials lead the list of causes. Poverty is associated with substandard housing, lack of smoke detectors, smoking, and faulty heating and lighting systems.

The residential fire death rate per 100,000 older people has decreased from six in 1984 to less than four, but it is still twice that of the general population. In 1995 residential fires caused about 3,600 deaths and approximately 18,600 injuries, greatest from December to February and least from June to August. Fires and fire related death rates in the United States are among the highest in the industrialized world. In 1977 to 1983 there were 7,000 deaths yearly comparable to mid-air crashes of two 747 jets monthly.

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See related Patient Topics Fire Safety, Safety or Safety--General.

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