What good are smoke alarms if your kids can’t hear? This Pasco mom found a solution

Heidi Cruz got a surprise last spring when she checked her smoke alarm.

When she pressed the button, it beeped like it should, but her 6-year-old daughter, Adriana, didn’t react to the noise.

“It became a red flag to me that something had to be done,” Cruz said. “She has a little bit of hearing. Enough that you would think that loud noise, she would have heard it, but she didn’t.”

There are smoke alarms designed for the hard of hearing, but they also cost $200 to $300 — too expensive for the mother of five.

And while Adriana’s hearing is the worst, she is only one of three of Cruz’s children with hearing problems. That leaves her daughters at risk of not noticing a fire before it’s too late.

So Cruz turned to the Pasco Fire Department and the American Red Cross of Central and Southeast Washington. And they arranged for two bed-shaker alarms for Cruz’s home this week.

The device looks like an alarm clock attached by a wire to a disk. When the smoke alarm sounds, the clock detects the noise and starts vibrating the disk and flashing the word “fire.”

“It’s not going to go off accidentally,” said Ben Shearer, who runs the Pasco Fire Department’s Community Risk Reduction program. He said these are the first the department has installed.

Sound the Alarm Campaign

While the alarms are unusual, several local fire departments join with the Red Cross’ Sound the Alarm campaign to ensure everyone has working smoke alarms in their homes. Shearer said they currently recommend one alarm in each bedroom.

“More than 50 percent of the home fires we go to, people don’t have working smoke alarms,” he said. “If there is a working smoke alarm there is more than double the chance of getting out of the home.”

Last year, the local Red Cross gave out more than 600 alarms from Yakima to Walla Walla, and nationally the program saved more than 500 lives, said Peggy Hogarth, the executive director for Central and Southeastern Washington.

Hearing loss in the sound range that smoke alarms use is common, and a significant portion of the deaths that occur during fires happen at night, Shearer said. This makes it necessary to have something that can wake children up.

Cruz is grateful and is excited to act as an ambassador to other families with children with hearing disabilities. She hopes to reach other parents through Rowena Chess Elementary, with the Tri-Cities only public school deaf education program.

“It makes me feel a lot more safe to know that my kids have something there to let them know there is danger,” she said.

People can sign up for the Red Cross program by going to Getasmokealarm.org.

This story was originally published February 15, 2019 at 7:18 AM.