Many Central New Yorkers are firing up the oven or turkey fryer tomorrow to prepare their Thanksgiving feast. But all that cooking comes with an increased risk of fire. Jon Barrett is Past Cicero Fire Chief and current training education chair for the Firefighters Association of the State of New York or FASNY. He said despite repeated reminders, people are still making the same mistakes.
“Plan ahead. Learn how to thaw that turkey almost a week in advance so it's not frozen," Barrett said. "If you're going to fry it, don't fry it inside. Do it outside, away from the house. We see a lot of them do it in the garage, in the foyer of the residence, and that's a no-no. That's a disaster waiting to happen.”
He recalled about a decade ago, a Cicero resident deep fried a frozen turkey in the foyer and ignited a fire that destroyed the house. No one was hurt.
Barrett said the leading cause of kitchen fires is unattended cooking, say when guests arrive or kids pull you away.
“People are walking away, and just for that minute, you have a kitchen fire in the oven that's extended into the kitchen cabinets and the rest of the kitchen.”
Barrett said working smoke detectors and fire extinguishers are helpful for small fires, but he knows detectors could be triggered if there’s light smoke.
“The kitchen area, I get it. When you're cooking, the smoke detector is very sensitive. It may go off," he said. "We see a lot of the residential houses that we go into on basic fire alarms, people are getting the habit of, 'oh, I'll take the detector down.' They have sealed batteries now, so now they can't take the battery out, they take down the detector, and they forget to put it back up.”
That could spell disaster in case of an actual fire. Barrett said cleaning built-up grease in the oven and keeping combustibles away from the stove are also good prevention measures.
Cooking fires increase exponentially at Thanksgiving, and the U.S. Fire Administration says New York is one of the top states for cooking fire risk and fatalities.
