NFPA Journal - Spring 2023 - 26

firefighters discovered a homeless man had suffered
third-degree burns from a fire under a bridge in 2014,
they began delivering food and fire-safety messaging
to local homeless individuals.
" We've never really thought about doing fire
prevention for the homeless, but that's something
Taylors is going to start doing now, " Assistant Fire
Chief Bobby Van Pelt told local media. " We're going
to start visiting these people and trying to teach
them about fire safety, especially in the wintertime
when they're trying to stay warm. "
RESEARCH AND
SOLUTIONS
Efforts like those carried out by the LAFD and
Taylors Fire Rescue are examples of the kinds of
community outreach the fire service and other
public safety professionals can undertake to help
prevent homeless-related fires. But what remains
lacking in many cases is a specialized approach to
fire safety education for people experiencing homelessness.
Not only can safety messaging crafted for
housed individuals miss the mark when given to
unhoused people, experts point out, but the typical
channels used to disseminate information may also
be ineffective at reaching homeless populations.
An NFPA-sponsored report published recently by Kindling,
the nonprofit dedicated to addressing global fire
safety inequalities, calls attention to this gap. According
to the report, " most fire safety public education efforts
by the fire services, schools, or non-profit organizations
don't target, or may struggle to reach, insecurely and
vulnerably sheltered or housed populations and may not
be contextually appropriate or sensitive to competing
needs, wants, and risks faced by this population. " As
an example, the report notes that fire safety messaging
focused on electric stoves might be provided for people
who are mostly cooking over open flames.
Sarah Rehou, a senior research coordinator for the
Burn Program at Hamilton Health Sciences in Hamilton,
Ontario, ran into this problem in the winter of
2021, and she ended up working to find a solution
to it. " We had been seeing patients admitted to the
burn center who were homeless, while at the same
time there was a ton of media coverage about fires
occurring in encampments, " said Rehou, who at the
time was working for the Ross Tilley Burn Centre
in Toronto. Canada's largest city is home to an estimated
18,000 experiencing homelessness, and the
number of annual deaths among those people has
nearly doubled in the past three years, according to
the Toronto Public Health department. Some of those
deaths occurred in encampment fires.
But when Rehou, who is also a first-year medical stuNFPA.ORG/
HOMELESS
Read
the recent
Kindling report,
" The Invisible US
Fire Problem. "
dent at St. George's University in Grenada, tried to start
spreading fire safety and burn prevention messaging
among Toronto's homeless community, tools like blog
articles and Instagram posts simply didn't work. She
also realized, just as the Kindling report indicates, that
26 | NFPA JOURNAL * SPRING 2023
existing messaging didn't cut it, either. That's when she
connected with local outreach workers who had spent
time volunteering at homeless shelters and building
relationships with locals experiencing homelessness.
Armed with these connections, Rehou embarked on
a boots-on-the-ground project to survey people experiencing
homelessness about their encounters with,
and perceptions of, fire, with the ultimate goal of producing
a fire safety manual for homeless individuals.
She and a team of frontline workers surveyed dozens
of people, some of whom were newly homeless while
others had been homeless for decades. They asked
questions like " What do you use to build fires? " and
" How do you think fires could best be prevented? "
The project was a success, and the result was a
12-page fire safety manual published in the spring
of 2021. While some messaging in its pages would
be instantly familiar to anyone who's shared or
consumed standard, existing fire safety messaging-
such as never leaving candles unattended-other
parts were clearly written to be unique to the experience
of living outside.
In a summary of the project published last year
in the Journal of Burn Care & Research, Rehou and
other researchers wrote that " the reality is that people
are trying to survive freezing winters while sleeping
outside, [and] this means that some safety standards
are not possible, and the guide had to reflect that.
For example, we practiced fire escape plans during
training sessions and had to think about obstacles like
tents with only one way out. A solution was to keep a
utility knife inside and outside the tent in case one had
to cut through to escape or to free someone. "
After the manual was published, Rehou and her
team held training sessions for encampment residents;
along with copies of the manual, they also
distributed fire blankets, fire extinguishers, and
first aid kits. It made a difference. One night, just
hours after a training session had taken place at
an encampment, a fire broke out there. " One of the
people trained was able to jump out of their shelter
and use a fire blanket to put out a fire before it got
worse, " Rehou said. " We know that training works. "
At the same time, she said, there is " much more
to do. " Fires in Toronto's homeless encampments
have continued, including one that killed a man in
March 2022 and another in November that led to
a large explosion involving several propane tanks
under an overpass.
THE PATH FORWARD
As fire departments, public safety professionals,
and others work to develop more education- and
outreach-based solutions to the fire problem among
people experiencing homelessness, experts say one
potentially underrecognized spot to seek answers
will be the fire-prone shantytowns that characterize
urban centers in many developing nations. Fires
in these locations-officially known as informal
http://www.NFPA.ORG/homeless
NFPA Journal - Spring 2023

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