Read this article on another site and felt it worth a mention.  We teach fire prevention beginning in 1st grade.  Maybe we should look at what these other countries are doing that places us so far behind them.

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From: Virtual LAMP POSTm October 16, 2009

Study: U.S. Behind World in Fire Prevention
<http://cms.firehouse.com/content/article/printer.jsp?id=66049>

Fire officials in the State of Guanajuato in Mexico have a belief that the best fire department isn't the one that responds to the most calls. Rather, it's the one that prevents the most fire.

A new "best practices" report shows virtually the entire world does a far better job at reducing fire causalities than the United States by as much as 50 percent in some cases.

The final installment of a three-year study examining how 10 nations handle fire prevention in their countries was recently released. The report, commissioned by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was researched and written by System Planning Corporation's TriData Division in Arlington , Va. The principal researcher was TriData's president Philip Schaenman .

"It's not that other nations are doing anything that we haven't tried, it's just that the scale in which they do it is just spectacular compared to what we do here in the United States," said Schaenman, who in the late 1970s and early 1980s, served as the U.S. Fire Administrator in charge of the National Fire Data Center.

Best Practices Report Part 1 (PDF)
http://www.firehouse.com/WorldStudyPart1.pdf

Best Practices Report Part 2 (PDF)
http://www.firehouse.com/WorldStudyPart2.pdf

Best Practices Report Part 3 (PDF)
http://www.firehouse.com/WorldStudyPart3.pdf