SPOKANE VALLEY, Wash. — This week is Community Risk Reduction Week and fire departments across the country are sharing how the community and firefighters can work together to prevent common dangers before they happen.
“A good community risk reduction program has many elements to it,” said Spokane Valley Fire Department Division Chief Ken Johnson.
Those elements are education, economic incentives, emergency response, enforcement and engineering. These strategies are used to help reduce risk in the community.
This year, the community risk reduction organization is focusing on economic incentives and budget-friendly ways for people to keep themselves safe.
“An economic incentive could be installing free smoke alarms in homes that need them or making people aware of resources that are available to clean up around their homes,” said Spokane Fire’s community risk reduction manager Jamie McIntyre.
One economic incentive SVFD offers is CPR classes.
“Today we have a completely different way of doing CPR that we’re finding is more than 50% successful and 20 years ago that was unheard of. So even internally, our firefighters are improving,” Johnson said.
Another incentive is free home assessments.
“We can go to their house and do an inspection on their home and help guide them through some of the risk,” said Johnson.
All of these free tools can help keep your family safe, which is the goal of Community Risk Reduction Week and the goal of your local fire department.
“Every person that works to serve the mission of our fire departments is living out community risk reduction,” McIntyre said.
If you are interested in one of the free services offered by SVFD, you can find out more by clicking here.
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