S.A.F.E. House

The Safety Awareness & Fire Education (S.A.F.E.) House is a 28-foot (8.5M) recreational vehicle used to prepare and train children for the unexpected experience of fire. The S.A.F.E House program is available for elementary schools and community special events. Please call our Public Education Office if you would like more information.

The S.A.F.E. house is self contained, other than requiring an electrical connection. It can easily be towed and quickly set up. The S.A.F.E. house contains, in miniature, a livingroom, kitchen, stairwell, and bedroom with balcony. It has a variety of primary and alternate exits. It is shown here set up at a Morgan Hill elementary school; El Toro is in the background. Just off-screen to the left is a freestanding mailbox labeled "meeting place", designed as an assembly area for the children after evacuating the safehouse.

This is a shot of the livingroom. The scale is deceptive; the ceiling is only about 4' (1.2m) high, with all the fixtures scaled accordingly.

A student volunteer helps Associate Public Education Officer Gina Cali demonstrate the proper way to smother a stovetop pan fire.

The S.A.F.E. house has a small control room that serves several functions. It contains a "dispatcher's" telephone, so that the children can practice calling 911. It also contains a closed-circuit video camera system, which allows monitoring of the various rooms in the house. Here, the children are upstairs in the bedroom. The control room contains a smoke generator, which can rapidly fill the S.A.F.E. house with non-toxic vapor simulating smoke. It also has controls for the various smoke alarms and ventilation fans in the house.

The children are upstairs in the bedroom. With the flip of a switch, "smoke" rapidly fills the house.

Within seconds, the house if full of smoke, and the smoke alarms activate. This photo gives the best idea of how thick the smoke really gets: note how it obscures the ceiling light and video camera.

The children then practice crawling beneath the smoke, down the stairs, out the door, to the assembly point.

Like smoke from a real fire, visibility is better down low near the floor. These photos were chosen because they show subject matter; most of the time visibility is near zero. Unlike "real" smoke, however, this vapor is neither hot nor acrid, and smells rather like caramel.

Once the children have evacuated from the safehouse, it can be quickly ventilated and reset for another class. In a 20-minute session, the children learn Stop-Drop-and-Roll, household fire safety, kitchen fire safety, how and when to test smoke alarms, how to treat burns, how to call for help, and how to escape from a burning building. They also learn about automobile and bike/skateboard safety.