Alarm Is a Key to Survival

As investigators searched the ruins of the Placentia home where a fire killed four members of the Ybarra family last week, one finding came as no surprise: a disconnected smoke detector.

Like tens of thousands of other Americans, the Ybarras had taken down their broken alarm and had never gotten around to replacing it.

The blaze killed Donald Ybarra and his three young sons--Brandon, Connor and Jacob. Neighbors said that by the time they were alerted, the house was engulfed. Only Ybarra’s wife, who dashed outside as her husband ran upstairs in a futile effort to save his sons, survived.

A working smoke detector, officials and neighbors agreed, might have made a difference.

Federal statistics show that one in five homes have nonfunctioning smoke detectors. These homes, along with the small number where detectors have never been installed, account for nearly 80% of deaths from residential fires.

Capt. Stephen J. Miller, spokesman for the Orange County Fire Authority, said working fire alarms were missing in every house fire he has seen where people died.

Firefighters and safety experts have heard all the reasons people dislike--and disconnect--smoke detectors: burning toast, the dryer, a steamy shower all set off the irritating squeal. The batteries run down--more irritating beeps--and are a hassle to replace. The detectors are a pain to install.

After decades of declining fire deaths because of smoke alarms, the number of lives saved is starting to level off. Researchers say that to save more lives, they need to find ways to get people to stop disconnecting their smoke detectors. Stricter laws, public service announcements and even door-to-door educational efforts can only do so much.

Now they are looking toward technology.

At a federal laboratory in Maryland, researchers are studying how to create the ideal smoke detector: an alarm that would sound when there is a fire, not when toast is overcooked.

“The problem is all the ‘nuisance’ alarms,” said William Grosshandler, chief of fire research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “If we could cut down on those, people would stop interfering with the smoke detectors.”

There are no industry standards aimed at minimizing false alarms. Product testers do not give higher marks to detectors that go off only when there are fires.

Instead, products are tested only to make sure they sound when there is a fire, not that they keep quiet when there isn’t one.

Grosshandler and others say the technology to cut down on the nuisance factor exists--it just needs to be perfected. And if it can be fine-tuned to the point where there is only one nuisance alarm, instead of several, for every actual fire, fire departments might consider having home alarms send a signal to firehouses directly.

“Fire departments aren’t interested in doing that with the current technology because they don’t have the resources to respond to all the false alarms,” Grosshandler said. “But if we can develop an alarm certified against nuisance sources, then it becomes possible. The firetrucks could roll as soon as an alarm goes off.”

And people won’t keep taking down their detectors because they’re annoyed by all the unnecessary alarms.

The airline industry is a driving force behind the research, which is being funded by industry and government grants. Commercial planes are plagued by nuisance alarms in their cargo areas. Federal aviation rules require that they land at the nearest airport as soon as an alarm goes off.

“It creates a safety problem if they have to make 100 emergency landings for every real fire,” Grosshandler said.

Some safety officials say existing technology could reduce nuisance alarms in the home--it’s just a matter of getting consumers to pay for it.

Battery-powered alarms that sell in the $60 range offer temperature gauges and carbon monoxide detectors and combine laser and radiation technology. They can be adjusted to be less sensitive to smoke when installed in the kitchen and more sensitive in bedrooms.

Lithium batteries in the higher-priced alarms last 10 years, which eliminates the complaint that batteries run down too quickly.

The problem, safety experts say, is that the high-tech models are often passed over for less sophisticated devices that cost about $10.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say one easy solution is to require all new homes to be built with “hard-wired” alarms with battery backups that can’t be dismantled. All Orange County cities have such a law in place. Placentia, where the Ybarras lived, also mandates that all new homes have sprinklers.

“The problem is you can’t enforce those standards on older homes,” said Kim Blindauer, a CDC epidemiologist. The Ybarra house was built 30 years ago.

A 1997 survey conducted by the National Fire Protection Assn., a Massachusetts-based nonprofit group, offers insight into why so many homeowners leave their battery-operated fire alarms disconnected for so long: Most people think they’re at minimal risk of a house fire. And nearly half of those surveyed believe that they would have more than 10 minutes to safely get out of the house should a fire start in the living room.

The reality, according to the association, is that a fire can kill everyone in a house within two minutes.

“When the smoke alarms don’t work in a house, the risk of someone in it dying increases by up to 50%,” Blindauer said. “People need to keep their alarms up and working.”