By Stephanie Farr
The Philadelphia Daily News
PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia last year marked its lowest number of fire fatalities in recorded history, said Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers, who credited education, enforcement and technology for the decline.
Fire fatalities dipped from 39 in 2008 to 30 in 2009, far below the recent peak of 52 deaths in 2005 and 2006. Ayers said that records go back to the early 1950s, and that in some of those years, fire fatalities numbered in the 70s or 80s.
Ayers said that to him, the most devastating fatal fires are those that were preventable. Of the 30 fatalities in 2009, 21 took place in houses without working smoke alarms, he said.
A Frankford blaze in July that started with an unattended stove claimed the lives of three generations of the Hatchett family — a 66-year-old woman, her 32-year-old daughter and the daughter’s 7-year-old son.
Ayers said that when he went into the charred rowhouse, he found a smoke alarm on a third-floor dresser without batteries.
“They lost their lives and they didn’t have to,” he said. “It breaks your heart.”
In Brewerytown in March, three generations of the Cooper family, including an 8-year-old girl, died when a faulty extension cord ignited a sofa.
Firefighters were baffled when they couldn’t find the smoke alarms they’d installed on the first and second floors just months before. A hard-line system and a portable alarm in the basement were also not working.
“Those are the things that just grab at you,” Ayers said. “Why did this happen when it didn’t have to?”
Despite the tragedies, Ayers said an increasing use of hardwired smoke alarms and long-lasting lithium batteries contributed to the decline in fatalities, as did the department’s Freedom from Fire campaign, which encourages families to develop escape routes and complete fire-safety check lists.
The department’s Fire Fatality Program, which has firefighters go door-to-door with home safety check lists on a block where a fatal fire has occurred, has also been a success, Ayers said.
Many of the continuing problems with fire fatalities include social issues such as hoarding, improper home heating and unchecked elderly residents, Ayers said.
Although fire deaths are at their lowest, Ayers said, incidents of carbon monoxide were up from an average of 131 in the previous five years to 406 in 2009, though none of the carbon monoxide cases were reported to be fatal.
So far this year, two city residents have perished in fires — a 37-year-old woman who was using her stove to heat her home and a 74-year-old woman who died in a blaze started by improper use of a kerosene heater.
“Each fire is hurtful because you stop and everything unravels as you look through and see the eeriness of the burned-out home,” Ayers said. “You see everything in the same place where it would normally be — family pictures, portraits, Bibles - but it’s all burned and charred now.”
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