"My daughter's upstairs. I'm looking at her room...and going back and banging and banging and screaming," recounted Sheila Hackert while holding back tears.
It was a helpless feeling for Mrs. Hackert as she watched her Rotterdam house go up in flames with no way to go back inside and save her daughter and husband. That was nearly eight years ago, May 31, 2001. Only Sheila and her son got out alive.
Hackert said, "I'm alive because of a puppy, my son's alive because he heard me screaming."
What no one heard, were the home's smoke alarms. That's because they never went off, despite having working batteries.
Hackert said, "They failed my family, they took half my family."
Sheila's home had an ionization detector. A melted, twisted piece of plastic is what's left of it with the original battery still inside. What many people don't know is that there are two types of smoke detectors: Ionization, which are better at detecting flames and photoelectric which are better at responding to smoldering fires. The fire in Sheila's home began as a smoldering fire.
So FOX23 News asked firefighters at the Barre City, Vermont Fire Department to test how different alarms react in a smoldering fire.
Firefighter Matthew Cetin said, "This will give us an opportunity to see how different detectors activate and how long they take."
In a vacant house, there are six detectors on the ceiling. Two are ionization, two are photoelectric and two are combo alarms. Using a soddering iron, to simulate a cigarette on a couch, we watch and wait as the smoke slowly fills the room. After approximately twenty minutes both photoelectric detectors go off. About twenty-two minutes in the combination detectors go off. Time goes by and it gets harder to see and harder to breathe. We're forced to put our air packs and masks on. More time passes and it becomes tough just to see the person in front of you. Finally fifty minutes after the test started, the ionization detectors went off.
Cetin said, "If people don't know this information, they can't protect their families."
Firefighters in this small Vermont town have made it their mission to educate the public after five members of the Foster family died in December 2005. Cigarette ashes sparked a smoldering fire and the home's ionization detectors never went off. Because of this case, Vermont changed the law to require the installation of photoelectric-only smoke detectors. That law went into effect January 1. A change of the law, is something Sheila Hackert would like to see here in New York.
Hackert said, "If it's an ionization like I had and you had a fire like I had, then you might as well write off that whole family because they're not going to get out."
In part two of our report, find out what firefighters here in New York are saying about which smoke alarms you should have in your home. Plus, when you're at the store, what do you need to look for and, why Sheila Hackert's fight is far from over.
Check out Part Two
