LIBERTY LAKE, Wash. – “How do I get out of my room if there’s a fire?”
The question, asked at the Spokane Valley Mall by 10-year-old Quinn Whitley and posted to Facebook by her mother, inspired Spokane Valley firefighters to surprise the young child on Tuesday afternoon. They also saw it as an opportunity to spread awareness about house fire prevention and safety plans, especially after the department dealt with the tragic death of two children in an October house fire.
“Within the fire department, I know (that fire) had a greater impact than any call I can remember,” Spokane Valley Firefighter Sean Wagner said. “There’s just opportunity to learn and to teach and to do everything that we possibly can to keep homes, individuals, families as safe as possible.”
Wagner is a massive part of the learning process, being one of the firefighters in the department who makes regular trips to second and third-grade classrooms to teach kids about fire safety. SVFD estimates they reach about 3,400 students through that program per year.
On Tuesday, Wagner was Whitley’s primary contact, meeting with her privately before any media arrived, then taking her outside to surprise her with an opportunity to sit in the driver’s seat of a fire truck.
After putting the SVFD captain’s hat on, Wagner and Whitley went inside to review what Whitley learned when SVFD visited her classroom earlier. They ran through the importance of having a working fire alarm on every floor of your house, tested every month and replaced every ten years. Wagner asked her if she remembered why it’s always important to sleep with your door closed.
“Because if there’s a fire and your door is shut, it can’t come into your room,” the 10-year-old responded.
“Yes, it helps a lot,” Wagner responded. “There’s two things fire loves to do: it loves to grow and it loves to move. So when you have your bedroom door shut you’re helping keep that fire smaller and you’re helping it from moving.”
This piece of information even caught Jacklyn Whitley, Quinn’s mother, off guard.
“It’s not really something I had thought of or even known about,” she said.
Then, the time finally came for Quinn to get an answer to her question.
Wagner and Quinn Whitley went to her second-floor room, where Wagner laid out her two options for escape if her smoke detector was going off.
Her first option would be leaving through the door in her room, but Wagner told her she has to be careful and make sure it’s safe before attempting to leave.
“You want to make sure that door is not hot, right? Because if that door’s hot, it’s telling you that the other side of that door and that hall over there, that’s really hot and that’s not a good environment for you to be in,” he said.
Option two? Help firefighters by letting them know you need them to come to your window.
“Open up your blinds,” Wagner said as he demonstrated for Quinn Whitley, “because we’re going to need to know where you’re at and save us time. Your bedroom is too high for you to get out… you’re gonna need a ladder to get you out.”
However, if smoke is entering the room, Wagner told Quinn Whitley, getting below the smoke is always the top priority.
“The most important thing is to stay low under that smoke, keep as much smoke out of your room as possible and then wait for the firefighters to come rescue you.”
Quinn Whitley went on to tell all her classmates about her time with the firefighters during lunch on Wednesday, hopefully spreading the message further than just her. She received a medal from SVFD for her curiosity and possibly, a memory to last a lifetime.
“It just meant the world that they would walk through that with her simple, yet really good question,” Jacklyn Whitley said.
