Slightly Off the Mark

Give a Smoke Detector a Job

The theme for this year's Fire Prevention Weeks is "Smoke alarms: Make them work for you". Which sound like a great idea, but then you have to pay them, and send W-2 forms, and it would mess up your taxes ...

In any case, here's the link to the National Fire Prevention Association's info on the subject:

https://www.nfpa.org/events/fire-prevention-week

During my four decades in the emergency services, I never heard anyone complain that their smoke detectors worked properly. Well, okay, once—but that guy was an arsonist.

Fire Prevention Week this year is October 6-12, mostly because nothing else goes on in mid-October. No, actually it was because the Great Chicago Fire happened on October 9, 1871. That fire destroyed more than 17,400 structures and killed at least 250 people, and might have been prevented if Mrs. O’Leary had installed a smoke detector in her barn. Have you ever seen a cow remove a smoke detector battery? Me neither.

Nobody really knows what started the Great Chicago Fire, so the dairy industry has a real beef with blaming the cow, which legend says knocked over a lamp. Does the lamp industry ever get the blame? Noooo....

Cow or lamp? Trick question: It's a training session, so firefighters.

At about the same time the Peshtigo Fire burned across Wisconsin, killing 1,152 people and burning 16 entire towns. Several fires burned across Michigan and Wisconsin at the time, causing some to speculate that a meteor shower might have caused the conflagration. There may have been shooting stars elsewhere, but Chicago got all the press.

This year’s Fire Prevention Week theme is "Smoke alarms: Make them work for you!" It's not like they're going to be busy elsewhere.

Just as you should change your smoke detector batteries every fall and spring, you should replace your smoke alarm every ten years. Doing the same to your carbon monoxide detector is a great idea, so it can make a sound to warn about the gas that never makes a sound.

This is great advice, and as I hadn’t given much thought to the age of my own smoke detectors, I took it. The one in the basement stairway said: “Manufactured 1888 by the Tesla Fire Alarm Co.”

Not a good sign.

The one in the kitchen hallway said simply: “Smoke alarm. Patent pending.”

Oh boy.

So check them. Do it right now, so they're working for you. I know it doesn’t have quite the pizzazz of the 1942 Fire Prevention Week theme: “Every Fire Helps Hitler”.

But hey … you can’t blame the Nazis for everything.

We and our books can be found ... everywhere:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

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Remember: Books are flammable, so keep them protected. Especially our books.

Grandma Nannie Bricker, R.I.P.

Grandma Nannie had, by any standards, a challenging life.

She was raised in rural Tennessee during the Great Depression. She worked as a nurse and watched her husband go off to Europe for World War II. He was, she's told me, not the best husband ever.

After he passed she remarried, but eventually he passed away, too. Nannie had to go through the deaths of all her children, a grandson, and two great-grandchildren. Eventually she had to leave her home and move into a nursing home. I can tell you everyone was great there, but just the same, she was reduced to having half of a room to herself, after being independent for so long.

After all that, she made it to age 99. Her obituary is here:

https://tributearchive.com/obituaries/33226387/nannie-bricker/albion/indiana/harper-funeral-homes

I was not a good grandson. I didn't go to see her nearly as often as I should have, although thankfully Emily and I did have a nice visit with her a few weeks ago. The last time we stopped in, just a few days before her death, she was sleeping so soundly we couldn't bear to wake her. Now we wish we had. Emily and I were hatching a plan to take her to my daughter's baby shower, but considering the logistical challenges and how much she'd fallen in recent years, maybe it was for the best.

And yet when we'd show she was unfailingly chipper and happy to see us. Her mind was sharp right to the end.

It was a call I'd expected for some time, and I handled the news more badly than I'd thought I would, more badly than I should have. You see, Grandma Nannie was ready to go. You can have your own opinions about religion, but arguing with her about it would have been a very bad idea. She knew where she was going when she died, with complete confidence. If you knew her, you wouldn't doubt it. She was ushered through the Pearly Gates into the open arms of God, and right now she's hanging out with all the loved ones who went before her.

We can grieve, but we can't be unhappy for her. Her pain is gone. Her body is no longer frail. Her medical issues are in the past. She is loved.

Storm Report: Noble County Tornadoes, September 24

So ... tornadoes.

I don't need to say "possible" tornadoes, because several people got videos and photos of the funnels and their damage. I headed up to dispatch, and so the photos I'm showing were taken from the dispatch window a short time after the fact.

It got pretty funky for awhile, but by the time I got to work the twisters were just crossing into LaGrange County, heading northeast. (If you're not from Indiana, LaGrange County is directly north of us in Noble County, and borders the Michigan state line.) We got a fair amount of rain, which is good for our drought, but I never noticed any thunder from here. I believe the closest the confirmed funnels got to us was five or six miles, and heading away.

It's a little hard to see through the window, but we got a rainbow, and a little later a double rainbow. This is looking northeast toward where the storms were going.

And this is looking pretty much straight east. The lighted rectangle is ... well, a rectangular light, behind me.

This is looking toward the east also, as the storms moved away from us. Those clouds are close to, or over, Ohio, which I believe also had a tornado warning. We were paying more attention at the time to the tornado cutting a swath through LaGrange County. There wasn't much warning, because the storm basically formed and dropped its funnels right over us. The damage was largely in the Ligonier area, northwest of Albion. It could have been worse: Many funnels that didn't reach the ground were also spotted.

It's a little hard to see, but that's a large flock of birds that took off shortly after the storm passed. Maybe headed south, or maybe "anywhere but here".

And a final photo of the courthouse as the clouds clear, with the birds above. I've noticed that building has "moods" based on the lighting conditions, and this time around it was kind of spooky.

From what I'm hearing at this point it sounds like two tornadoes actually touched down, one in Noble County and one that caused damage all the way through LaGrange County. In Noble County some buildings were damaged, including a residence that lost its roof. The Ligonier area lost power, and we had to call out firefighters and the Noble County Highway Department to clear trees from roadways. Stop lights were out, power lines down--the usual.

For awhile we had six dispatchers in here, where normally we'd have two or three. All the emergency services were pretty busy, as you might imagine, and we stayed busy for awhile. Still, we had no reported injuries here in Noble, so there's that--but two people were injured in LaGrange County when the Amish buggy they were in was hit. (No, I haven't heard anything about the horse's condition.)

This weekend the hurricane is reaching us, but only with gusty winds and some rain.