Pets and Fire

[fishnut 2,358]

Anyone who has pets of any kind please get one of the "save our pets" stickers and display it on your home! I just picked up 3 dogs, 2 Guinea pigs and 1 rabbit from a home that was on fire. the dogs were found right away but the guinea pigs and rabbit were not and almost died because the family did not have one of the save our pets stickers so the fire dept did not know about them. Also 2 cats are still missing and hopefully they made it out of the home. so again please make sure you have a sticker displayed and it is up to date with a list of all the animals that live in the home. 

[Pythagoras 2]

Thanks for the heads-up, will do so

 

Hope those kitties made it out okay.

[voyager9 3,434]

Not sure how I feel about these. Firefighters aren't going to make entry based simply in stickers. And certainly not pets. Either conditions warrant a primary search or they don't. It they do make entry then they're looking for everything. Fire, humans, and even pets.

 

And please. If you have those old kid-safe stickers please remove them if the kid has grown up. I can't tell you how many houses around here that still have stickers from two homeowners ago and the kid is long grown and gone.

[fishnut 2,358]

If the house is burning and the owners aren't home then the fire fighters know how many and what type of animal to look for that's all I'm saying.

[Howard 538]

Where do you get these stickers?  Where do you stick them?

[fishnut 2,358]

Sometimes your fire dept will give you one for free or ask your vet they usually have them too. If all elce fails I am sure you can find them online for sale. Most people put them in their front door

[P4Plenty 1]

Firemen do not look at those stickers. They either search or they don't. When they search they look for any life

[fishnut 2,358]

Well these firemen found the dogs but did not find the other animals the first time through the house. I went back over an hour later for the pigs and the rabbits.

[TooBigToFit 2]

While firefighters do try to look for anything living during a search of a house, a primary search is kinda "quick and dirty" (a more thorough secondary search may be performed after the fire is knocked down).  It's a whole lot easier to find something if you know that you're looking for it in the first place. In addition, it's a lot easier to find say, a dog, rather than a gerbil or hamster, given that the dog is usually free to roam while gerbils and hamsters are in a cage. Feel and sound are really the only 2 senses that one has in a burning building, and it's easy to tell by touching a dog to tell that it's a living thing. Touching a cage really will only result in a clang, which, for all the firefighter knows, could be some piece of furniture. Kinda corroborated by the original post, where the dog was found right away, but the guinea pigs and rabbit weren't.

 

Then again, there's no promise that sticker will do a single thing. Best bet (if you're there of course) is to let the guy with the white helmet know what's in the house, and where.

[Porthole 15]

Fire fighters do not go by stickers - whatever - save my dog or the traditional "Tot Finder" decals.

 

If entry is made - a search is a search.

IF animals are known to be in a house and can be retrieved without any significant danger, FF's will do their best.

 

"Risk a lot - to save a lot"

"Risk little - to save little"

[effd27145 0]

As an active fire officer in my local department i will throw in my experience here. Ill say 90+% of the time any sticker on a house advertising pets inside the residence will most likely be ignored. New construction in recent years has implemented the technique known as lightweight construction on a significantly large scale, and active fires in buildings constructed this way are much more prone to collapse.. Fire attack tactics have been changing in past years. The new strategy places a lot more emphasis on tactics based on threat to life and property. Porthole has it right, We will risk a lot to save a lot, but we wont risk a lot to save a little, and unfortunately pets, and property are not worth the risk of sending firefighters into these modern collapse hazards, or even old structurally sound buildings, if fire conditions have a grasp on the structure of the residence or building itself. 

 

So generally speaking those items will be overlooked, but again, no house/structure fire is ever the same and each one warrants its own plan of attack based off of multiple different conditions that exist on the fire scene.

 

Where I say the usefulness in such an idea lies is after the fire is extinguished and we are performing a secondary search, if by a chance a sign is located it might help us to keep an eye out, but even so, we normally are looking for anything as such anyway and we cannot always take the information on signs such as that as correct in the first place.