Begin the New Year fireworks-safe

Though we usually think of fireworks for summer celebrations, New Year’s Eve is the time when the second most injuries from fireworks occur. The video you can watch by clicking here is from the California Statewide Safety and Education Program. Some child actors do a good job of showing close calls averted, not because the kids are careful but only because the Preventor shows up.

Those of us responsible for youngsters can help them stay safe by teaching them the dangers of fireworks. The Fireworks Safety section at keepkidshealthy.com is an excellent primer on the subject.

Teaching Internet safety

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has assembled a large, varied and high quality resource of ideas and resources for teaching Internet safety. The materials are organized into four age-appropriate categories: Grades K-2, Grades 3-4, Grades 5-6, and Middle and High School. This range of resources can be accessed from the Online and Offline Activities page. The interactive Clicky tutorial shown above is for K-2. Additional categories of materials are offered in the Teach Internet Safety category of the website’s sidebar.

The trend among experts in the Internet safety field has been in recent years not to advocate prohibiting children from using the Internet, particularly not older kids. Instead, enormous efforts have been made to develop ways of teaching Internet safety. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children offers some of the best information and resources for teaching Internet safety. They also provide a great deal of good information and advice on other children’s safety subjects throughout their website.

Autobiography of a bomb dog

If a situation ever occurs at a school where a bomb sniffing dog is used to investigate, the event will be less alarming for children who know what the dog is doing and that the dog is a highly trained specialist whose job it is to keep them safe. Among its “Kid’s Pages” the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has an autobiography of a bomb dog. Letting children read this story is a way for them to gain understanding of the dogs’ skills and to be prepared to appreciate them when they see the dogs at work. The dog who tells his story is a real FTA bomb dog named Truman. He explains, for example:

I can smell tiny traces of explosives and ammunition residue from guns; I can smell thousands of times better than any human. This is really important, because my smelling ability will help protect the public. Sometimes people do bad things to try to hurt others. I can help stop that from happening, or, if it has already happened, I can find evidence to help law enforcement officers find out who did it so that the person can never do it again.

The picture above shows Truman and his partner Joe checking cans for traces of explosives. Truman’s full autobiography is here.

Students injured in shooting could be helped by information

Last week six high school students were injured by gun shots when two other students opened fire on them as they got off a school bus. The incident happened in Las Vegas. Click this USA Today report for the full story.

Information can be a huge, and sometimes critical, way to minimize the harm to school students when they are endangered and injured. Defywire provides those responsible for school children with two major kinds of information that is very important in a situation like the one in Las Vegas:
- how to reach a student’s parents or guardian
- health facts about the child that are a factor in his or her treatment.

In the Las Vegas incident, Defywire Guardian would have made it possible for the bus driver to use his or her mobile phone to provide both kinds of information for each of the injured students. The mobile could also have been an instantly available communications focal point for notifying law enforcement and other school officials. The school officials could then have used their Defywire data to find out the names of all of the students on the bus making it possible to let the parents of all children involved know the status of their own child.

Traveling Safely With Children

The holiday season is travel season for millions of families. That means for many, traveling with children. A website that has been online for over a decade, AirSafe.com, provides expert advice on a wide range of air travel subjects. For families who will be flying during the coming holidays AirSafe’s experienced advice is here: Top 10 Safety Tips for Traveling With Children.

The American Academy of Pediatrics also has a webpage of Travel Safety Tips. This advice is grouped by airplane, international and car. One of several sources cited is the Federal Aviation Administration’s Child Safety on Airplane page. The FAA page is the source of the above picture which illustrates a section giving the basics on child restraints.

Safety Tip: Drugs & Alcohol

The holiday season is a time when vacation and parties expose young people to lots of opportunities and excuses for using and abusing substances and drinks. As the Defywire Safety Tip on this subject points out: talking to kids, especially about drugs and alcohol, is never easy — yet parents influence youngsters on these subjects more than any other person. Click the Safety Tip of the Week page and the December 10 movie to watch this tip.

Video messaging in the safety picture

For the past two days I attended WebVideo Summit07, where I learned a great deal about the videos that are cascading on to websites and into mobile phones. One of the most interesting presentations was by a company called Veeker which is, among other things, serving as the platform of some citizen reporting via video to local NBC TV news stations.

The Veeker talk included an account of how citizen video reporting proved to be a significant safety factor in the wildfires earlier this fall. People reporting fire danger from onsite through their mobile devices made it possible in some cases for media to stay ahead of the danger curve in alerting their audiences.

As I listened, my thoughts shifted to how school staff and faculty could use video messaging for school safety. This may become an important piece in the school safety picture in our increasingly digital times. Veeker has an explanatory webpage about this new communications venue.

Water That Tree!

Anyone who brings a real tree into their home to decorate for the holidays should watch the video clip called Water That Tree! The webpage at the US Fire Administration where the video is posted explains:

The video clip above from the Building and Fire Research Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology illustrates what happens when fire touches a dry tree. Within three seconds of ignition, the dry Scotch pine is completely ablaze. At five seconds, the fire extends up the tree and black smoke with searing gases streaks across the ceiling. Fresh air near the floor feeds the fire. The sofa, coffee table and the carpet ignite prior to any flame contact. Within 40 seconds “flashover” occurs – that’s when an entire room erupts into flames, oxygen is depleted and dense, deadly toxic smoke engulfs the scene.

The page also says quite plainly: Well-watered trees are not a problem. Once again, a simple precaution can be a major safety factor.

Safety Tip: Christmas tree cords

Places to buy Christmas tree are popping up all over town. One of the early exciting things to do this season for many children is to help select and decorate the Christmas tree that lights their home during the holidays.

The trees are potentially a serious fire hazard. A key safety tip is to make sure not to overload extension cords and circuits. Basic rule of thumb: when in doubt, remove some plugs. To see this reminder from the Defywire’s Safety Tips, look for the title Christmas Tree Safety: click here to see it under July 9, 2007.

Need for safer shelters at schools

USA Today reports that deadly tornados at school have shown the need for safer shelters. The report is illustrated by the above image from March 1, 2007 of a helicopter evacuating an injured person from Enterprise High School in Alabama. USA writers track the events and lessons learned in when the tornado killed eight students “even though the National Weather Service said Enterprise school officials and students followed appropriate safety measures before and during the tornado . . . .” The conclusion: “the storm demonstrated the need for a safe-room shelter.”

From Alabama’s Press-Register comes this opinion piece titled Alabama’s deadly lesson:

TWO IMPORTANT messages came out of a National Weather Service study of the fatal tornado that hit southeast Alabama nine months ago.

Eight students were killed at Enterprise High School when winds of up to 200 mph collapsed the school’s roof. The tornado that hit Enterprise was the worst of 31 twisters that struck 45 counties in Georgia and south Alabama in a sweep of storms that fatal day in March.

The first message from the report that’s important for the Enterprise community is this: Stop blaming school officials for the tragedy. Their decision to keep the children in the building was, the National Weather Service says, the right thing to do even if it didn’t turn out well.

“Dismissing the students could have been just as dangerous,” NWS meteorologist Glenn Lussky of La Crosse, Wis., told The Associated Press. Mr. Lussky led the study. “This is just one of those cases where everyone did everything they could,” he added.

The second message: Build reinforced, hardened safe rooms in every school. These are concrete-reinforced rooms with strong shutters or no windows, where students can quickly go when storm alarms sound.

Enterprise school officials learned the lesson in the worst way possible when the high school building couldn’t withstand high winds, and children died. The new schools being constructed in Enterprise will have “tornado shelter” rooms.

School officials throughout Alabama should include safe areas in all new schools and can look at reinforcing designated safe areas in existing school buildings.

Hurricanes are the worst storms for the Gulf Coast, and preparing for them gets lots of attention from officials and residents. The Enterprise tragedy showed that isolated tornadoes can be dangerous on a smaller, but equally deadly, scale.

They, too, deserve to be taken seriously, especially by school officials who have responsibility for the safety of children.