Red Cross installing fee smoke alarms; volunteers needed

The American Red Cross of South Central Kentucky will be installing free smoke alarms and reviewing critical fire safety information with Elizabethtown-area households from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, April 26.

“It’s part of our national Sound the Alarm event where we go in and work to make homes safer,” said American Red Cross of South Central Kentucky Executive Director Jennifer Capps. “We’ll send out teams of two to three people and they will go into the home. They’ll provide some home fire safety education. They’ll help the family create an evacuation plan, and then we’ll install free smoke alarms.”

The event is free and open to anybody in the community.

“Our smoke alarms expire after 10 years, so if you pause and think, your smoke alarms may be expired in your home, so we want to make sure that we’re not only checking those as the time changes and replacing batteries and those sorts of things, but if your smoke alarm is more than 10 years old you definitely need new ones, and there are so many people that don’t even have working smoke alarms,” Capps said.

Capps says a working smoke alarm cuts the risk of death in a fire by half.

As the organization is looking to reach as much of the community as possible, the Red Cross is seeking volunteers to assist with the campaign.

“If you need smoke alarms and you want to volunteer, we’ll make sure that your home is on your route with your team that goes out and you can knock that out during that shift,” Capps said.

Visit www.soundthealarm.org/kentucky to register to volunteer or to schedule a home visit.