The week of Oct. 3-9 is Fire Prevention Week in the City of DeKalb.

The DeKalb Fire Department locally supports the National Fire Protection Association’s Fire Prevention Week campaign of “Smoke Alarms: A Sound You Can Live With.”

Fire Chief Bruce Harrison said DeKalb has been participating in Fire Prevention Week throughout his career.

“The National Fire Prevention Association developed a nationwide program in ‘57 through the current time,” Harrison said. “There’s been some level of Fire Prevention Week recognized in this community over the last 30 years for sure.”

Lt. Karl Froehlich, DeKalb fire prevention officer, said this year’s theme is to make an awareness of smoke detectors.

“That device that’s on your ceiling or wall is something that will possibly save your life in a fire,” Froehlich said. “We need to make sure that smoke detector is working. It doesn’t do any good to have that piece of plastic on the ceiling if it’s not functioning properly, if it doesn’t have batteries in it or has been disabled in one way or another, or it’s just old.”

Froehlich said smoke detectors have a service life of about 10 years and should be replaced beyond that.

“It’s vital that we understand the importance of smoke alarms because if they go off rather early, they allow people to escape and get to safety,” said DeKalb Mayor Kris Povlsen. “It’s really about saving lives.”

Froehlich also said the department has a program that gives smoke detectors to those who do not have them in their homes free of charge.

“I think this week is important because people recognize the dangers with fire and work toward preventing fires,” Froehlich said.

According to NFPA statistics, roughly two-thirds of all home fire deaths result in homes with no smoke alarms or no working smoke alarms.

“When we can promote people to use caution and prevent fires, we can potentially save lives,” Froehlich said.

Harrison said he believes DeKalb is a very good fire department, but without the community being aware of behaviors that can keep them safer from fire, they will fail.

“If we had our way, selfishly, we’d try to make fire prevention a focus in our community every day to some extent,” Harrison said. “But with all the things that people need and all the concerns in our community, this is the one week that we try to reach out to the media outlets and do a variety of activities to sort of instill that sense that it’s a participative effort.”

Harrison said while Fire Prevention Week is a revenue limited initiative, they are still getting the message out about the kinds of actions that can prevent fires in homes.

“In all reality, if we can prevent a fire we’ll do it because that’s the best way to deal with any kind of emerging fire problem in our community,” he said.