Home Fire Escape Plan

Fire Escape Plan Tips

Fire can spread rapidly through your home, leaving as little as two minutes to safely escape once the alarm sounds. The Cosumnes Fire Department offers these tips in creating your home escape plan:

• Make a fire escape plan for your family. 
• Children and older adults will need help escaping a fire. Know who needs help and pick someone to help them. 
• If someone in the household has a hearing impairment, install a special smoke alarm that uses strobes and/or vibrations to signal a fire.
• Establish an outside meeting place where everyone should meet.  It should be a safe distance from the home. Use a mobile phone or a neighbor’s phone to call 911. 
• Once you get out, stay out. Do not go back inside for any reason.
• Smoke alarms should be on every level of your home and inside or near every bedroom. For the best detection and notification protection, install both ionization and photoelectric-type smoke alarms. 
• Windows with security bars on doors should have a "quick-release" latch. This makes it easy to get outside in an emergency. 
• Know at least two ways out of every room. You might need an escape ladder to get out of upstairs bedrooms windows. If so, they should be part of your fire drill and can be deployed safely from a ground-floor window for practice.
• Twice a year, practice your home fire drill, using different ways out, at night and during the day with everyone home.
• Test each smoke alarm monthly. To test, push the test button until you hear a loud noise.
• Young children might sleep through the sound of the smoke alarm, assign a family member to wake children for fire drills and real emergencies.

More Information

• Create your Home Fire Escape Plan (PDF)
• NFPA Home Fire Escape Plan Safety Tips
• NFPA Handouts and Safety Tip Sheets in Other Languages