Fires caused by smoking cause more deaths than a fire started by anything else. Take safety precautions while smoking to avoid damage to your home and family. Smoking outside and properly extinguishing your cigarettes, cigars and pipes reduces your chance of starting a fire and causing health problems for the people closest to you.
Don't Fall Asleep
The majority of fire fatalities occur due to fires started in living rooms, dens or bedrooms, warns the National Fire Protection Agency. Avert this tragedy and never smoke in bed under any circumstance or in a comfortable chair when drowsy. If you fall asleep while smoking, you may accidentally set fire to your bedclothes, linens or furnishings. Exercise caution while smoking under the influence of prescription medications that cause drowsiness. Always extinguish your cigarette immediately when you feel tired.
Fire Safe Cigarettes
Consider smoking fire safe cigarettes to promote safety in your home and workplace. Impregnated with citrate-burning agents, a regular cigarette can smolder up to 45 minutes when abandoned. In contrast to conventional cigarettes, a self-extinguishing cigarette puts itself out when it reaches one of two bands present within the cigarette paper. When an unattended self-extinguishing cigarette burns down, reaching the rings, the smoker must puff on the cigarette or it goes out. Use caution when smoking a self-extinguishing cigarette. It still garners the ability to start a fire.
Oxygen Tanks
For safety's sake, do not smoke or light a match while using oxygen or in a room where an oxygen tank is in use. Oxygen is not flammable, but increases the ability of other materials to ignite. Posting "No Smoking" and "Oxygen in Use" signs in clear view at all the entrances to buildings where oxygen tanks are present alerts everyone entering the building of this danger.
Proper Storage
Safely store your tobacco products and accessories out of the reach of children to avoid accidental fires and nicotine poisoning. Nicotine poisoning represents a chief reason for calling poison control centers, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. Improperly stored products used to help adults stop smoking, such as gum and lozenges, look like candy to children. Children playing with cigarettes and lighters can start a fire in your home or outdoors.
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
For the safety of your child, avoid smoking during your pregnancy and around your infant. Fetuses and infants exposed to secondhand smoke are more likely to experience sudden infant death syndrome, according to information provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Compared to infants who die from other causes, SIDS babies show higher concentrations of the chemicals contained in secondhand smoke.
References
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Health Effects of Secondhand Smoke
- National Fire Protection Association: Smoking
- Wisconsin Department of Commerce: Certification off Wisconsin Fire-Safe Cigarettes
- Westmont: Oxygen Safety at Home
- EurekAlert!: Tobacco company's new, dissolvable nicotine products could lead to accidental poisoning
