The overused understatement of the decade is, “This is an unprecedented time.” While the coronavirus outbreak has turned our lives into something none of us likely ever imagined, one fundamental life safety truth remains: THERE IS NO JUSTIFIABLE REASON FOR LOCKING EGRESS DOORS OR OTHERWISE COMPROMISING MEANS OF EGRESS IN OCCUPIED BUSINESSES. We have seen some pretty extraordinary things with respect to application of the Life Safety Code over the last month or so, including the conversion of convention centers and dormitories into makeshift hospitals. These conversions have required health care providers and authorities having jurisdiction (AHJs) to creatively apply the goals and objectives of the Code to these facilities while not meeting the precise, prescriptive requirements. In some cases, the rules have needed to bend in order to achieve the necessary goal of saving as many patients' lives as possible. This is perfectly justifiable.  While many businesses have been forced to close to minimize the spread of the virus, others have been deemed ‘essential' by state governments and continue to provide needed services. In many areas, these include grocery stores, building supply/hardware stores, and restaurants for take-out/delivery. For these operating businesses, the importance of social distancing is recognized and the way we shop for groceries and other items probably looks a bit different than it did a month ago. In the area where I live, stores have adopted practices whereby the number of shoppers permitted in the store is limited to avoid crowding; aisles have been designated as one-way to reduce the occurrence of shoppers passing one another in close proximity; at the checkout lines, marks on the floor indicate where to stand to maintain a distance of 6 ft from other customers. These are all reasonable precautions to help keep staff and customers healthy and they have no adverse impact on fire and life safety. On the other hand, NFPA has also been made aware of some businesses locking egress doors and blocking exit access paths to control access and the flow of customers through the store. This might be well intended to enhance social distancing, but it could be extremely dangerous in the event of a fire or similar emergency requiring the evacuation of occupants. The current health emergency might justify turning an exhibit hall into a field hospital without meeting all the prescriptive Code requirements for a health care occupancy, but it does not justify compromising means of egress from a grocery store, big box store, or fast food restaurant. A fundamental tenet of life safety from fire is means of egress must be available to building occupants whenever the building is occupied. If a fast food restaurant is open for drive-thru pickup only, the egress doors must be openable from the inside by the workers without requiring the use of a key, tool, or special knowledge via one latch/lock releasing motion (e.g., depressing a panic bar or lever release). If a door can't be locked from the outside and remain operable from the inside, the door must remain unlocked; a sign on the door indicating drive-through service only is available will have to suffice. The same goes for entrances to grocery stores; if only one entrance is to be used to control access, other entrances serving as required means of egress must remain unlocked. Signage or staff can be utilized to direct shoppers to the queue at the designated entry point. Likewise, aisles are required egress paths and must not be blocked. Floor markings, signs, and staff can all be used to direct the flow of customers while leaving the aisles accessible in and emergency. Too many people have died in fires over the years due to compromised means of egress. The situation we, including first responders, currently face is difficult enough. Let's not make it any worse by creating situations having the potential to lead to a large loss-of-life fire. With a little creativity, employees and customers can be kept safe from both the coronavirus and fire. Did you know NFPA 101 is available to review online for free? Head over to www.nfpa.org/101 and click on “FREE ACCESS.” NFPA has also provided a wide range of resources that support fully operational fire and life safety systems, while balancing the realities of the current pandemic. Our goal is to support you and your work during this difficult time. How are we doing? How else can we help? Take our short survey and tell us what you think. Thanks for reading. Stay safe and healthy. Follow me on Twitter: @NFPAGregH

How did I get here? When you read an average of a half-dozen home fire death stories every day for a month, it changes you. That's not hyperbole; I did, and it changed me. At the conclusion of 2019,I wrote in my #101Wednesdays blog about the year and decade in review in terms of life safety from fire.While there were several significant advances, I pondered about whether enough was being done to reduce the number of civilian deaths in home fires. The number has hovered between about 2,500 and 3,000 for the last 20 years or so. This is a significant improvement over the number of deaths recorded in prior decades, largely attributable to the proliferation of smoke alarms; but it's not getting any better. I had to ask myself, “Is this good enough?”   To help me understand the problem, I assigned myself a project. On January 1, I started scouring the internet for media reports of home fire deaths and tweeted the results each day with a running tally (you can see them in my Twitter feed at @NFPAGregH – see the hashtag #homefiredeaths). The U.S. Fire Administration's website was a valuable resource; between their data and my findings, I was able to provide a daily summary of who was dying in home fires every day in the U.S. My goal was to educate myself and to raise awareness. I did so until this past Monday, January 27, when the task became too much; the numbers were so high that it was affecting my ability to perform the functions NFPA pays me to do and was cutting into my nights and weekends. Reading all the stories of loss and tragedy also had an emotional impact on me. I needed to be reminded of why I came to work for NFPA almost 24 years ago. Yes, overseeing the development process for codes like NFPA 101 is important work and ultimately leads to a safer built environment. But I believe there's more that we – I – can do to make a real difference, and the home fire death problem is certainly an area in which there is room to make a difference.   While each story I read over the past month was tragic, there were several that stood out in my mind. This journey actually started a few days before the new year. On December 27th, a spectacular fire destroyed a Concord, MA mansion. This fire garnered tremendous media attention despite the fact that no one was killed or injured. On the same day, a father and his two young daughters died in a fire in their modest apartment in Hemet, CA; this fire was barely a blip on the media radar. The disparity in coverage was glaring.   On January 5th, two men died in a house fire in Fitchburg, MA. The fire was blamed on an overloaded power strip (or relocatable power tap in code parlance); coincidentally, the latest #FireCodefridays blog addresses electrical safety requirements in NFPA 1, Fire Code. This fire stood out to me because I grew up in the adjacent town and was a member of that town's on-call fire department in the 80s and 90s. We ran mutual aid to Fitchburg quite often; that's where I caught most of my “big fires.” Because of my personal experience, this fire hit close to home.   On January 8th, an elderly woman died in a fire in Ellabel, GA caused by a clogged dryer vent. This fire stuck out for several reasons: one was because the victim was elderly, as were several other victims I documented over the month. Another was because the fire was in a manufactured home (or “mobile home” as commonly referred to by the media). Manufactured home fires and elderly fire victims are apparently not uncommon. If you search my Twitter feed for #manufacturedhomefire and #olderadultfiredeath, you will find several occurrences. Another fire in a manufactured home in rural Kentucky killed a grandmother and three children the day before.   Another house fire in Kentucky left a mother and her six-year-old daughter dead on January 17th. This fire was noteworthy because it was reported that the home had no working smoke alarms; this is also not an uncommon occurrence (search my Twitter feed for #noworkingsmokealarms). It's unimaginable to me that people still don't have working smoke alarms. This will be a topic for a future post in this series. On January 20th, a fire in a Bronx, NY high-rise apartment building killed an 85-year-old retired NYPD police officer. Although not reported, it is presumed that sprinklers were not installed in the apartment of fire origin. The combination of a high-rise building, residential occupancy, elderly residents, and lack of automatic sprinklers seems to be a “perfect storm” with regard to the potential for large numbers of fatalities. Disaster was averted in this fire thanks to the strong work by the FDNY.   The home fire death problem appears to stem from a combination of lack of protection (sprinklers and smoke alarms) and an apathetic public. Codes like NFPA 101 can prescribe minimum protection requirements, but we can't regulate people's attitudes towards fire; this is, I believe, the biggest hurdle to be cleared if we're going to lower the numbers of fire deaths. In this series, I don't expect to have a lot of answers; rather, I intend to ask questions to stimulate discussions to help hone in on the things we can change to have the biggest impact. I figure I've got about another 15 years left in this career. It won't mean much in 2035 to have my name in a bunch of Life Safety Codes if 2,500 to 3,000 people are still dying each year in U.S. home fires as they have been for the last 20 years. Thanks for reading, and as always, stay safe. The views expressed in #101Wednesdays are my own and do not reflect the views of NFPA. Did you know NFPA 101 is available to review online for free? Head over to www.nfpa.org/101 and click on “FREE ACCESS.” Follow me on Twitter: @NFPAGregH    NOTE: This blog first appeared as part of Mr. Harrington's #101 Wednesdays blog series on NFPA Today on January 29, 2020.

A resident clings to the exterior of a 25-story Los Angeles high-rise apartment building on January 29, 2020; photo courtesy of Al Seib/Los Angeles Times I have to wonder whether passersby on L.A.'s Wilshire Boulevard thought they were witnessing the filming of a new action film, considering they were only about nine miles away from Hollywood. This was no movie, however. This was real life, and the scene that played out on the morning of January 29th at the Barrington Plaza apartments was nothing short of terrifying. A 19-year-old man died and 13 other people were injured – 10 civilians and three firefighters – in a fire on the sixth and seventh floors of a 25-story apartment building. The building, which was constructed in 1961 and the scene of another major fire in 2013, was not protected by an automatic sprinkler system. According to media reports, the City of Los Angeles does not require high-rise buildings to be protected by automatic sprinkler systems if they were built prior to 1974. This has led some to ask about NFPA's position on sprinkler protection for older high-rise buildings. NFPA's position is established by the requirements in its codes and standards that are developed using an ANSI accredited, open-consensus process in which any person can participate. Two NFPA codes specify sprinkler requirements for existing high-rise buildings: NFPA 1, Fire Code, and NFPA 101, Life Safety Code. The requirements of NFPA 1 and NFPA 101 differ slightly because the two codes have different scopes and different goals and objectives. The scope, goals, and objectives of NFPA 101 are limited to protecting building occupants from the effects of fire and similar emergencies. Building occupants are those who live, work, or otherwise normally occupy a building. Building occupants, in the context of NFPA 101, do not include emergency responders. Because NFPA 101 is concerned only with occupant life safety, protection of neither the building itself nor its contents is considered. If a building has a fire in which all occupants are able to safely evacuate and the building subsequently burns to the ground, the goals and objectives of NFPA 101 are considered to have been satisfied. The life safety requirements of NFPA 101 are based on a building's occupancy classification (i.e., how a building is used). The Barrington Plaza building would be classified by the current edition of NFPA 101 as an existing apartment building. In addition, any building having a floor level more than 75 ft above the lowest level of fire department vehicle access is a high-rise building; the 25-story building in question meets this criterion. The 2018 edition of NFPA 101 requires existing, high-rise apartment buildings to be protected by automatic sprinkler systems unless one of the specified exemptions exists. Because this requirement applies to existing buildings, it is intended to be applied to any high-rise apartment building that was constructed prior to the adoption of the 2018 edition of the Code, irrespective of the requirements of the code adopted at the time of construction. NFPA 101 does not “grandfather” existing buildings. Two exemptions apply to the mandatory sprinkler requirement: one is if every apartment is provided with exterior exit access (e.g., outside balconies), and the other is if the building is provided with an engineered life safety system (ELSS) designed to compensate for the lack of sprinkler protection and approved by the applicable authority having jurisdiction. ELSSs can be comprised of a combination of partial sprinkler systems, smoke detection systems, smoke control systems, building compartmentation, and other approved systems. An ELSS is an engineered, complex, alternative system that is designed to provide a level of protection essentially equivalent to that afforded by automatic sprinklers. In some cases, building owners might find that the design and installation of a complicated ELSS is cost-prohibitive and the installation of a relatively simple automatic sprinkler system is more cost-effective. Whereas the scope of NFPA 101 is limited to occupant life safety, the scope, goals, and objectives of NFPA 1, Fire Code, include not only occupant life safety, but also emergency responder safety and property protection. For this reason, the high-rise building sprinkler provisions of NFPA 1 and NFPA 101 differ. The 2018 edition of NFPA 1 states that all existing high-rise buildings, regardless of occupancy classification or when the building was constructed, must be protected by automatic sprinkler systems, without exception, within 12 years of adoption of the Code by the applicable jurisdiction. NFPA 1 does not offer the ELSS alternative, recognizing the life safety benefits as well as the property saving benefits of automatic sprinkler systems. While neither NFPA 1 nor NFPA 101 has criteria that specifically addresses short-term rental of residential dwellings, it is interesting to note, according to media reports, residents of Barrington Plaza complained about numerous units being used as such with sites like Airbnb. It's reported that some units would be rented for a night by partiers. Where a building is used for residential purposes on such a transient basis, it starts to have some of the characteristics of a hotel. Codes have different requirements for hotels when compared to apartment buildings recognizing the transient nature of the occupants. The 19-year-old who died in the Barrington Plaza fire was an exchange student from France. Further details haven't been released so it isn't known whether he was a short-term renter, if he had a standard lease from the building management, or if he was a visitor. Regardless, the risks associated with hotels and apartment buildings differ, and this is a topic that warrants further study. (A feature article in the July/August 2018 issue of NFPA Journal titled “The Airbnb Challenge” addresses this issue.) Automatic sprinkler systems have proven to be the best defense against fire in high-rise buildings. While the recent fire in Los Angeles was tragic, it had the potential to be catastrophic. I believe the outcome would have been much different had the fire occurred at 2:30 a.m. instead of 8:30 a.m. The relatively few numbers of injuries were thanks to the heroic efforts of the members of the Los Angeles Fire Department who selflessly put their lives on the line. They had no other choice, largely because an older high-rise building was grandfathered from requiring a basic fire protection feature like an automatic sprinkler system.

How did I get here? When you read an average of a half-dozen home fire death stories every day for a month, it changes you. That's not hyperbole; I did and it changed me. At the conclusion of 2019, I wrote in my #101Wednesdays blog about the year and decade in review in terms of life safety from fire. While there were several significant advances, I pondered whether enough was being done to reduce the number of civilian deaths in home fires. The number has hovered between about 2,500 and 3,000 for the last 20 years or so. This is a significant improvement over the number of deaths recorded in prior decades, largely attributable to the proliferation of smoke alarms; but it's not getting any better. I had to ask myself, “Is this good enough?” To help me understand the problem, I assigned a project to myself. On January 1, I started scouring the internet for media reports of home fire deaths and tweeted the results each day with a running tally (you can see them in my Twitter feed at @NFPAGregH– see the hashtag #homefiredeaths). The U.S. Fire Administration's websitewas a valuable resource; between their data and my findings, I was able to provide a daily summary of who was dying in home fires every day in the U.S. My goal was to educate myself and to raise awareness. I did so until this past Monday, January 27, when the task became too much; the numbers were so high that it was affecting my ability to perform the functions NFPA pays me to do and was cutting into my nights and weekends. Reading all the stories of loss and tragedy also had an emotional impact on me. I needed to be reminded of why I came to work for NFPA almost 24 years ago. Yes, overseeing the development process for codes like NFPA 101 is important work and ultimately leads to a safer built environment. But I believe there's more that we – I – can do to make a real difference, and the home fire death problem is certainly an area in which there is room to make a difference. While each story I read over the past month was tragic, there were several that stood out in my mind. This journey actually started a few days before the new year. On December 27th, a spectacular fire destroyed a Concord, MA mansion. This fire garnered tremendous media attention despite the fact that no one was killed or injured. On the same day, a father and his two young daughters died in a fire in their modest apartment in Hemet, CA; this fire was barely a blip on the media radar. The disparity in coverage was glaring. On January 5th, two men died in a house fire in Fitchburg, MA. The fire was blamed on an overloaded power strip (or relocatable power tap in code parlance); coincidentally, the latest #FireCodefridays blog addresses electrical safety requirements in NFPA 1,Fire Code. This fire stood out to me because I grew up in the adjacent town and was a member of that town's on-call fire department in the 80s and 90s. We ran mutual aid to Fitchburg quite often; that's where I caught most of my “big fires.” Because of my personal experience, this fire hit close to home. On January 8th,an elderly woman died in a fire in Ellabel, GA caused by a clogged dryer vent. This fire stuck out for several reasons: one was because the victim was elderly, as were several other victims I documented over the month. Another was because the fire was in a manufactured home (or “mobile home” as commonly referred to by the media). Manufactured home fires and elderly fire victims are apparently not uncommon. If you search my Twitter feed for #manufacturedhomefire and #olderadultfiredeath, you will find several occurrences. Another fire in a manufactured home in rural Kentucky killed a grandmother and three children the day before. Another house fire in Kentucky left a mother and her six-year-old daughter dead on January 17th. This fire was noteworthy because it was reported that the home had no working smoke alarms; this is also not an uncommon occurrence (search my Twitter feed for #noworkingsmokealarms). It's unimaginable to me that people still don't have working smoke alarms. This will be a topic for a future post in this series. On January 20th, a fire in a Bronx, NY high-rise apartment building killed an 85-year-old retired NYPD police officer. Although not reported, it is presumed that sprinklers were not installed in the apartment of fire origin. The combination of a high-rise building, residential occupancy, elderly residents, and lack of automatic sprinklers seems to be a “perfect storm” with regard to the potential for large numbers of fatalities. Disaster was averted in this fire thanks to the strong work by the FDNY. The home fire death problem appears to stem from a combination of lack of protection (sprinklers and smoke alarms) and an apathetic public. Codes like NFPA 101can prescribe minimum protection requirements, but we can't regulate people's attitudes towards fire; this is, I believe, the biggest hurdle to be cleared if we're going to lower the numbers of fire deaths. In this series, I don't expect to have a lot of answers; rather, I intend to ask questions to stimulate discussions to help hone in on the things we can change to have the biggest impact. I figure I've got about another 15 years left in this career. It won't mean much in 2035 to have my name in a bunch of Life Safety Codes if 2,500 to 3,000 people are still dying each year in U.S. home fires as they have been for the last 20 years. Thanks for reading, and as always, stay safe. The views expressed in #101Wednesdays are my own and do not reflect the views of NFPA. Got an idea for a topic for a future #101Wednesdays? Post it in the comments below – I'd love to hear your suggestions! Did you know NFPA 101 is available to review online for free? Head over to www.nfpa.org/101 and click on “FREE ACCESS.” Follow me on Twitter: @NFPAGregH 

As 2019 and the 2010s draw to a close, it's a good opportunity to reflect on our accomplishments as a fire protection and life safety community in reducing loss of life from fire and similar emergencies. It's also an opportunity to reflect on where room for improvement still exists. While people continue to die in fires, we continue to have work to do. For me, 2019 was punctuated by two occurrences: mass shootings (or more broadly, mass violence) and the fire at Cathedral Notre Dame in Paris. To date, there have been409 mass shootings with 486 people killed in 2019 in the U.S. (based on the unofficial definition of ‘mass shooting' being four or more people shot in a single incident). Nine of these incidents occurred at schools or universities. The Code doesn't regulate buildings to protect occupants from these acts of violence, but mitigating the risk certainly has life safety from fire implications. (I've always contended that security and life safety from fire are diametrically opposing forces.) NFPA has been responsive to the gun violence crisis in this country by facilitating, in 2017 following the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting, the development of NFPA 3000 (PS),Standard for an Active Shooter/Hostile Event Response (ASHER) Program. This provisional standard was developed on an emergency basis under ANSI regulations to respond to the need of communities for a framework for the development of programs to prepare for, respond to, and recover from active shooter and other hostile events. NFPA continued to work this past year to assist its stakeholders by providing training and a roadmap for the implementation of NFPA 3000, and it continues to facilitate the development of NFPA 3000 as a full-fledged, ANSI accredited standard, the issuance of which is scheduled to occur in 2020. In the Life Safety Code arena, the technical committee responsible for requirements in educational occupancies (K-12 schools) recognized in 2019 the need for practical, cost effective, and most importantly, safe classroom door locking solutions that could be implemented on existing doors without meeting the strict, single-motion lock/latch releasing requirement present in the 2018 edition of NFPA 101. Lacking a code-compliant, cost effective solution, the alternative for many school districts was to purchase and equip classrooms with dangerous barricade devices, and other makeshift arrangements, such as five-gallon plastic buckets containing rope, a hammer, a wooden wedge, and duct tape. To preemptively mitigate the hazards of these unsafe alternatives, NFPA issued a tentative interim amendment to the classroom door locking provisions in the 2018 edition of NFPA 101, and carried the same concepts forward in the draft 2021 edition slated for publication in 2020. The Cathedral Notre Dame fire last April drove home an important lesson in my mind; I wrote about it in my #101Wednesdays blog shortly following the fire. Although this particular fire resulted in no loss of life, it demonstrated where a fire protection (or life safety) plan relies on human intervention, the plan must accommodate, and compensate, for the very real potential for human error. The need for quality and consistent training can't be overstated. The Code can only do so much; unless communities and society embrace the concepts it embodies, the words in the book aren't worth the cost of the paper they're printed on. Following the Oakland Ghost Ship fire in 2016, I wrote about the need for a new way of thinking – a paradigm shift, of sorts – to prevent such recurring tragedies. I believe one such new way of thinking has been realized by the development of the NFPA Fire & Life Safety Ecosytem, a framework that identifies the components that must work together to minimize risk and help prevent loss, injuries, and death from fire, electrical, and other hazards. For the Fire & Life Safety Ecosystem to have an impact, it's up to us to continue to talk about it and educate. This is no easy task and will be an ongoing challenge in 2020 and many years to come. The past year and decade have seen important advancements in NFPA 101, including: new requirements for carbon monoxide detection; significant changes to health care occupancy requirements to accommodate homelike settings (e.g., community kitchens), particularly in nursing facilities, to enhance patients' cognitive abilities and dignity (so-called “health care culture change”) –these provisions were incorporated into the 2012 edition, which was subsequently adopted by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; and recognition of hazardous materials emergencies and targeted violence events in the 2018 edition. The area of fire protection and life safety in which I fear significant progress has not been made is home fire deaths.Fire data compiled by NFPA indicates somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 to 3,000 people die in home fires in the U.S. each year. These numbers haven't changed much in the last 20 years, let alone the last decade. NFPA 101 requires all new one- and two-family dwellings to be protected by automatic sprinklers; however, as long as trade organizations continue to successfully advocate against sprinkler legislation, that requirement, and a companion requirement in the International Residential Code, will have no impact. Granted, the vast majority of the population lives in existing housing stock and the installation of sprinklers in all new homes would not have a measurable impact on fire death statistics for decades, most likely. However, the impact would come one day; it's never going to come at the rate we're going. The question I ask myself heading into the 2020s, then, is, “Are we doing what's needed toreducethe burden of fire on society, or are we doing what's needed to maintain the status quo?” The numbers seem to point towards the latter. I don't know what it will take to drive the home fire death numbers down appreciably. Maybe it's sprinklers. Maybe it's stricter smoke alarm requirements. Maybe it's something else. I do know that I'm not content with maintaining the status quo; it's not good enough and it's not why I got into this business. I would challenge you to think about whether it's good enough for you as well, and if not, what are we going to do about it. I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy holiday season. We've done a lot of good work together this past year and decade; I'm looking forward to the good work we'll do together in 2020 and beyond. Thanks for reading, and as always, stay safe. Got an idea for a topic for a future #101Wednesdays? Post it in the comments below – I'd love to hear your suggestions! Did you know NFPA 101 is available to review online for free? Head over to www.nfpa.org/101 and click on “FREE ACCESS.” Follow me on Twitter: @NFPAGregH

Winter doesn't officially start for another couple weeks, but looking out the window here in New England and many other parts of the country tells a different story. Snow is covering the ground, and each additional storm will pile it higher. With the cold, wintry weather brings an increased risk of carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning from blocked heating system combustion exhaust vents. The current (2018) edition of the Life Safety Code requires the installation of carbon monoxide detectors or alarms in certain occupancies with combustion equipment, including: New assembly occupancies New educational occupancies New day-care homes New and existing health care occupancies with fireplaces New one- and two-family dwellings New lodging or rooming houses New hotels and dormitories New apartment buildings New residential board and care occupancies Most of us, however, live in existing homes – defined as those constructed prior to the adoption of the current edition of the code – with older heating equipment and vent systems. It's in these existing homes where the greatest risk lies. In 2005, seven-year-old Nicole Garofalo of Plymouth, Massachusetts died when a snow drift blocked the exhaust vent on her home's heating system. Several months later, the state enacted Nicole's Law in her memory, which requires all homes in Massachusetts with combustion equipment or enclosed parking to have carbon monoxide detection equipment. The law is enforced at the time a house is sold; fire department approval is required prior to the transfer. This exceeds the minimum requirements of theLife Safety Code, which does not require CO detection in existing homes. Kudos to Massachusetts for taking the lead on requiring relatively inexpensive, life saving protection where it's needed most. And what is the cost to provide this valuable protection in an existing home? I'll offer myself as a case study. When I bought my house a few years ago, it met Nicole's Law by having two plug-in CO alarms – one on each level. I just looked on my favorite online shopping site; a plug-in CO alarm goes for under $20. For under $100, you can protect a pretty good-sized home. Now, my house has a gas furnace, a gas stove, a gas fireplace, a wood-burning fireplace, and an attached garage; I wanted something more than a couple plug-in alarms. My house already had hardwired, interconnected smoke alarms that were due to be replaced. (Smoke alarms should be replaced every ten years or as directed by the manufacturer.) Instead of buying replacement smoke alarms, I bought combination smoke and CO alarms. Again, on my favorite online shopping site, a box of six hardwire combination carbon monoxide and smoke alarms with battery backup and voice warning goes for $168. I'm pretty handy so I did the installation myself. $168 was a small price to pay for the lives of me and my family. If you're reading this #101Wednesdays blog, I'm likely preaching to the choir. You already know about the dangers of CO poisoning and the need to keep combustion vents clear. Most people, however, don't think like us. So as this holiday season approaches, think about your neighbors. Check to make sure their vents are clear. Maybe if they're older, ask if you can help to clear them. Ask if they have CO alarms in their homes. If not, for $20 you could give a gift that's much more thoughtful than a fruitcake. See NFPA's website for more details on CO, including safety tips and NFPA's nonfire CO incident report. Thanks for reading, and stay safe. Got an idea for a topic for a future #101Wednesdays? Post it in the comments below – I'd love to hear your suggestions! Did you know NFPA 101 is available to review online for free? Head over to www.nfpa.org/101 and click on “FREE ACCESS.” Follow me on Twitter: @NFPAGregH