In this video, Derek Cole tours a mobile fire‑safety trailer used by the Firefighters Association for school outreach during United Way’s Day of Caring. The trailer simulates a house fire with realistic smoke, heat‑sensitive doors, and functional alarms, allowing children to practice safe evacuation techniques. Features include a heated door knob for teaching the “feel‑the‑door” method, a phone linked to a control center for practicing 911 calls, a tornado/hurricane module that flashes lightning, produces thunder, and displays emergency alerts, and a chain‑ladder escape for second‑floor rooms. The demonstrators explain how they teach kids to stay low, crawl down stairs backward, and use alternative exits when doors are hot. The program serves pre‑K through about 5th‑grade students, reaching roughly 3,000–4,000 children each year, and adapts activities for different age groups. The tone is conversational and enthusiastic, emphasizing the educational value and safety impact of the mobile exhibit.
Chapters
This right here, they're cleaning up the fire safety house for the Firefighters Association, and they take it to schools and they show kids what to do in the home in case a fire happens.
So you got—
where's the smoke come out of it?
Um, up top, right? Right there, there's a little round brown ones on the sidewall. Yeah, uh, in the other rooms upstairs, um, in that room in there. Now this door here, upstairs in that bedroom, this is the back side of it, but upstairs that door actually gets hot to the touch. So you can teach kids the proper way to feel the door to make sure there's fire on the other side, and they can put their hand on and feel the heat on this side of it. But this is the back side of the door. It looks like a real door on the other side, but It actually feels heat.
So what they teach them in here to do—
proper way to get out of a house if it's on fire, proper way to call. Downstairs we've got a phone hooked up that goes into the control center here. Teach them how to dial 911, the proper thing to say when you call 911 if you have to, address, things like that. They're actually talking to somebody on the phone so it don't feel like that they're just practicing. But it teaches them the proper escape, how to get out, Crawl, stay low. If I had it hooked up right now, we'd smoke it up so you could see it, but I don't have it hooked up, the power to it right now. But it actually smokes in here and it feels, it looks just like your house is on fire. It's actually got a storm package on it too that teach them how to get out in case of a tornado or hurricane. It flashes lightning in here, the thunder, the walls will shake with the thunder. The TV will come on with an emergency alert with a weather system thing telling you to get out. It's pretty cool.
That stuff on TV?
Uh, no telling.
Those VHS tapes?
They are VHS tapes.
This right here is a historical record.
Be cool about fire safety. There's a fire trailer. Surviving severe thunderstorms.
This right here is the videotape, kids. This is what we used to watch before DVDs.
News 24.
Let's go. We got upstairs too.
Yeah, we got upstairs bedroom. What is that? Again, we got smoke that comes into this room. All your smoke detectors work, they alarm, they buzz, they go off. This is to simulate like you teach the kids if they're in the bed asleep, wake up in a fire. Also, we're on the second floor, so we got a lot of kids that bedrooms are on the second floor, teach them how to properly crawl down the steps in case of a fire instead of just running or going headfirst. But, but again, huh, that's the balcony. You can go out there. Yeah, there's actually a ladder, uh, that goes over the edge that they can climb down, a chain ladder. Because a lot of— some houses have chain ladders that you just throw out the window to get out, and this here, uh, simulates that. We can do that with the older group, but the younger groups, we keep them down the stairs because safety issues. But, uh, it does have that. But that door behind you, Derek, the one to your left, that door— yeah, that door is the one I was telling you about when we were downstairs. That when it's hooked up, that door gets hot. And that way we can take every kid around here and teach them, because the last thing you want to do in a fire is open the door and there's fire on the other side and not in here because you bring it in. And also the doorknob can get so hot you can grab it and it'll burn your hand. So you teach them the proper way of laying their hand with their palm out to feel the door to make sure if it's warm or not, and touch the doorknob before they open it so they don't let fire in and get hurt. So this door would get hot.
So obviously if the door's hot, they don't want to go downstairs.
That's right. If it's hot, leave it closed, find another way out. And that would be out the balcony, down the balcony. But it, like I said, when we smoke it up in here, the smoke stays at the top like it does in a fire, and we teach the kids how to crawl out. And then when you get to the height to get to the steps, how to go down backwards instead of headfirst so you don't fall over and get hurt. On your way out.
Cool.
And we take kids pre-K and nursery school up to about 5th grade through here, and then after that they start growing out of this because it's just too small for them. But we usually run probably 3,000 to 4,000 kids a year through this thing. So it's used a lot.
It looks pretty good for all those kids.
Yeah, it's used a lot.
All right, so I leave backwards?
Yeah, crawl. You got to get down and crawl backwards down the stairs. Backwards.
