HOUSTON – It is a terrifying wake-up call for all of us: The fact that every 90 seconds in this country another house fire breaks out. That's a total of more than 366,000 fires a year, fires that will kill an average of seven people every day, many of them children.
Thank goodness for that smoke detector you have in your home to protect you in the event of a fire. Its screaming 85 decibel alarm seems so loud you would think it's strong enough, loud enough to wake anyone, right?
The problem is not everyone sleeps the same way or wakes the same way. Doctors say children between the ages of 1 and 15 years of age sleep much deeper than adults.
So with help from a Katy family, Darko and Brittany Dimitric and their two children, Niko, 2, and Madyson, 5, Channel 2 Investigates decided to test how young children react to the deafening sound of a smoke detector going off in the middle of the night.
We began by setting up night vision cameras in the children's room. Then we filled the house with safe, nontoxic, white smoke and waited for the home's six smoke detectors to go off.
Soon the alarms sounded, "Beep, Beep, Beep," the smoke detectors were blasting their jarring warning, but the kids were not moving.
Two minutes, three minutes, four minutes -- nothing was happening in the children's bedroom.
The two children barely even moved; they certainly didn't wake up and their two parents were in total shock over what was happening.
"I'm floored that they are not waking up for this. They have an alarm right there in their room going off. It's so darn loud, it is hurting my ears, but they are not waking up. This completely shocks me," Brittany Dimitric said.
"Yeah, this is absolutely unbelievable to see this, not even my son, who sleeps so lightly and wakes to everything is still asleep," said Darko Dimitric.
Finally, after 7 minutes of ear shattering, sound blasting through the house, we stopped the test, and mom and dad woke their kids up.
But it's really Darko and Brittany Dimitric who said they have been awakened to a startling new truth.
"You can't expect your children to wake up. You got to be prepared and get in there and grab them and run out of the house. You can't expect them
to get out themselves, because they may not," Brittany Dimitric said.
Now, we are not saying smoke detectors don't work -- far from it. For more than 35 years, smoke detectors have saved millions of lives. What this story is meant to illustrate is that you simply can't depend on just a small machine to wake your children in the event of a fire. You have to take charge and run in and make sure you get your children up and out of bed and out into the yard to safety.
What does work to wake young children out of a deep sleep? Firefighters we spoke to said a new kind of smoke detector seems to offer new hope. It's a smoke alarm that allows parents to record a personal message alerting their children to danger.
Parents record a message like, "Get up, Lisa. This is your mother. Your room is on fire. Get up now."
One such device is called the Kidsmart Vocal Smoke Alarm, and it is available on the Internet, if you look hard enough. At least one clinical study is being done on the device and others like it right now, but results are still a year or more away.
