By Kristen Kridel
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 2007 Chicago Tribune Company
CHICAGO — One common thread ties together fires that turned fatal in Chicago last year: absent or non-working smoke detectors, officials said.
In an effort to curb fire deaths, the Chicago Fire Department recruited Columbia College students to launch its most hard-hitting smoke-detector awareness campaign ever, Fire Commissioner Raymond Orozco said. Within 30 days, posters showing flaming buildings and charred homes will pop up on buses and at CTA stops.
“It’s our responsibility to keep pushing the envelope to figure out what we need to do to get out the message,” Orozco said.
Looking for a new perspective, firefighters turned to students in an ad-agency class that provides training through real-world advertising projects. “They’re part of the customer base we’re trying to reach,” Orozco said.
Most of the department’s previous smoke-detector campaigns relied on written reminders or used more subdued pictures, such as children holding the devices.
But these ads, which use photographs of Chicago fires, are more striking, authorities said.
In one ad poster, flames and smoke billow from the door and windows of a home. “It would have been possible to leave 10 minutes ago,” the caption below it states.
In another poster, a blackened dog sits in front of a brick building. Soot stains the perimeter of broken, third-story windows. The message below says: “This family of five didn’t have a working battery in their smoke detector. There was only one survivor.”
In 2006, city firefighters battled 2,163 blazes, spokeswoman Eve Rodriguez said. The fires killed 42 people.
At one blaze, three people were killed and three others were injured after a two-flat on the Southwest Side caught fire Nov. 30. Only one smoke detector, which was found in a second-floor hallway, was working at the time. The rest had dead batteries or no batteries.
As of Tuesday afternoon, there have been 13 fire deaths in Chicago this year, Rodriguez said.
A woman was found dead after a fire March 16 at her Northwest Side home, which had no smoke detectors, officials said.
At least two of the four students who worked on the new campaign said they never thought to check their own smoke detectors before starting the project. At the group’s first meeting, Robin Jones, 24, said she didn’t know whether she had a smoke detector.
Michael Murphy, 21, was typing up information for the campaign when he heard people rushing from his apartment building, which had caught fire. His detector never sounded. Murphy said all he could think of was “Why didn’t we ever check this?”
Realizing it can be difficult to grab someone’s attention in a world saturated with strong images, the students worked hard to select the most touching photographs for the project, said Laurence Minsky, professor of the Columbia ad-agency course.
If one person takes notice and checks a smoke detector, then the students have succeeded, Minsky said.
“We know that smoke detectors save lives,” he said. “Because of the students, the rest of Chicago will too.”