There’s no doubt that #liveline is a national treasure. Joe’s down-to-earth decency and ‘dog-with-a-bone’ style have seen him getting to the root of lots of issues, over the years, that have been getting up the nation’s noses. And if you’re the parent of kids between the ages of two and 13, Tuesday’s show was must-hear radio.
It started when a Limerick caller told Joe how about two occasions when her young children slept right through blaring smoke alarms. Liveline’s intrepid team then tracked down an Irish forensic scientist working at the University of Dundee. She had a particularly scary insight into the topic.
It turns out the Limerick caller’s children aren’t unusual. Professor Niamh Nic Daeid told Joe that regular smoke alarms will fail to wake a staggering 80% of kids aged two to 13. Research into the notorious case of arsonist Mick Philpott, supervised by Prof Nic Daeid, led to the worrying discovery.
“There were 20 girls and 14 boys in the study and the ages were between two-years-of-age and up to 13,” Prof Nic Daeid explained. “What we uncovered was that, across all of these children, only 20 per cent — so seven of the children — actually woke up during any of the tests, which was really surprising to us.”
Prof Nic Daeid went on to reveal that none of the boys who took part in the study had woken.
It seems that kids might react different to the sound frequency of the smoke alarm — lower frequencies work better. Other than that, Prof Nic Daeid told Joe, researchers just haven’t fully cracked this troubling mystery.
“Smoke detectors save lives and that’s a really important message to get across,” Prof Nic Daeid stressed. “But what we need to do is to create an awareness across individuals and families that, if you have children, don’t have an expectation that the smoke alarm will wake them.”
Joe was also joined by Tom Meehan, from EI Electronics, who has sponsored research into making smoke alarms better able to wake children. Tom told Liveline the company is looking at the development of lower frequency alarms for children’s bedrooms and the use of recorded messages from parents. Tom’s advice was to position alarms so that a parent, or responsible person, is woken first and can make sure the domestic fire safety plan is followed.
The good news is that Prof Nic Daeid is working closely with EI to find a solution to this concerning issue.
In the meantime, there’s a full list of home fire safety tips available here.
