How To Take Fire Safety Precautions With Campfires And Grills

How to Take Fire Safety Precautions With Campfires and Grills Instructions Things You'll Need: •

Grilling Cookbooks

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Barbecue Grills

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Charcoal

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Grill Utensils

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Camp Chairs

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Camping Gear

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Camping Stoves

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Fire Extinguishers

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Water Bucket

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Fire Extinguishers

1. Step 1

Keep children at a safe distance from campfires and grills. 2. Step 2

Wear close-fitting clothing - no scarves or skirts. 3. Step 3

Make sure nothing flammable is nearby. 4. Step 4

Have a fire extinguisher or a bucket of water handy at all times. 5. Step 5

Keep at least a 3-foot distance between the campfire or grill and anything else. Make sure there's no dry vegetation nearby. 6. Step 6

Put out all fires before leaving the campsite or grill area.

How to Take Fire Safety Precautions While Camping in a Trailer Instructions

Things You'll Need: •

Buckets

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Fire Extinguishers

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Fire Extinguishers

1. Step 1

Opt for electric lights in your trailer. Never use candles for lighting your way. 2. Step 2

Make sure all cooking and heating equipment is in good working condition. 3. Step 3

Have a couple of fire extinguishers handy in the trailer, and remember to keep them near an exit. 4. Step 4

Determine an escape route and a fire safety plan with your family. 5. Step 5

Keep a bucket of water handy for use in putting out all smoking or fire materials, especially before going to bed. 6. Step 6

Make sure all gas connections and fume vents are properly maintained

How to prevent the fires Submitted by administrator on Thu, 10/25/2007 - 14:48. •

editorials and opinion

By JAY AMBROSE Scripps Howard News Service Friday, October 26, 2007 The winds died down, it got more humid and cooler, and all of that on top of the heroic efforts of exhausted firefighters finally began to subdue the raging Southern California fires that claimed 1,500 homes and caused the evacuation of a record-setting half-million people. But the work's not done yet. Even after the last flicker of flame is doused, homes must still be rebuilt, businesses restored to good health, families assisted in dozens of ways and, as important as any of that, means found to prevent future conflagrations. It will not be enough simply to arrest arsonists who may have been responsible for two or more of the blazes in seven counties, or even to continue emergency-response improvements, already better than in the disastrous 2003 California fires, and far better than the response to the Katrina disaster in New Orleans. What's needed first and foremost is forestry thinning that has been blocked or slowed down in California and elsewhere by the extreme policies of would-be environmental saviors who do not understand the environment. A voice of wisdom on the issue is that of Thomas Bonnicksen in a pamphlet issued this year by The Forest Foundation. The holder of a Ph.D. in forest policy and an expert with 35 years in the field, he tells us how forests today have too many trees, an assertion that may strike some as odd until they learn that most forests had a fraction of the trees in the distant past as they have today. Forests that are "unnaturally dense" crowd out some plants and destroy wildlife habitat. They are also fuel-laden invitations for ferocious, earth-scorching uncontrollable fires. "With an abundance of dead, dry trees in the forests, fires burn hotter than natural," Bonnicksen writes. "They can easily jump eight-lane highways and blow right through or around fuel breaks. Intensely hot fires create strong winds and can hurl firebrands, or bits of burning trees, up to a mile away. There is nothing natural about a 200-foot wall of flame racing across the landscape. California's historic forests were more open, fuels didn't accumulate and fires stayed mostly on the ground." What once kept the forests less thick and fires less intense? Fire itself did it. Natural fires had once cleared forests of "excess growth and debris," but beginning better than a century ago, we started suppressing such blazes just as surely as Native Americans had once abetted lightning and other non-human causes of fires in nature's interest. We did something else, too. Governments instituted preservationist policies that could have done the job of natural fires by removing "excess fuels" without huge public expense -- by allowing carefully watched private companies to harvest wood that can be used for all kinds of useful purposes. But some environmental groups scream that forests should be left alone, and if the government says such and such a project is OK, watch and see what happens: lawsuits and appeals. But

government has done little to ease the way, and private companies will not invest long term if restrictions are of a heavy-handed, obtuse, profit-erasing variety, and if they have to keep looking over their shoulders at possible political changes of heart. One issue in California, a news account tells us, is whether to permit the cutting of large trees as a way of enabling timber companies to make enough to also take out brush that feeds fires but that does not cause purchasers to knock delightedly on the door. Bonnicksen was reporting before the latest blazes that "about 8 million people now live in the wildland-urban interface and are at significant fire risk" in California. Some people wish this settlement in and near forests had never happened, but it has and will not be undone. And some people insist that people who live in such places should pay fees reflecting the risk they knowingly assumed. Maybe. But financially wise, humane, environmentally sound policy would be to drastically reduce the threat to the lives and property of these people through more aggressive forest thinning that will not render those forests some kind of denuded desert, but will make them far closer to their inspiring, wondrous prehistoric state. Congratulations seem in order to officials at the local, state and federal level in coping with the California fires and caring for their victims; they acted quickly and coordinated with each other, most reports say. More congratulations will be due if they work to help stop what's become an annual threat in the state. (Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)