Apathetic Public? Ignorant? Neither?
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How often have we heard and said that the main obstacles to a better fire safety record are apathy and ignorance—that people really do not care about or are unaware of proper fire safety requirements? I argue that, with a few exceptions involving children and fire survival techniques, people are neither apathetic nor ignorant about fire.
Let me cite an obvious example of my point. That it is dangerous to smoke in bed is surely one of the most widely known of the fire prevention commandments. Yet, careless smoking continues to be the foremost cause of fatal fires. Do people continue to smoke in bed because they do not care if they suffer a fire? Because they are unaware of its hazards? Of course not. People smoke in bed despite the known risk because they enjoy it, or because it seems appropriate for the time and place, or for many other creature-comfort reasons. Smokers continue smoking in bed not because they are unaware of the Fire danger but in spite of it. (Incidentally, in Oklahoma City careless smoking on the sofa takes more lives than smoking in bed.)
Let’s consider what accounts for another major fire hazard—the misuse and abuse of the home’s electrical system. I would contend that most people know it is hazardous to put a penny behind a fuse. They probably do not know why, any more than they know how a C-cell battery operates, but they do know there is danger involved.
Perceived risk
So why do they do it? It is simply convenient for them to do so—an inexpensive, quick, and simple solution to a problem. The risk they perceive is often not sufficient to cause them to follow a safer resolution of their everyday problems. Similarly, people overuse and abuse extension cords for pretty much the same reasons: the low cost and high convenience outweigh the perceived risk.
I am not arguing that all fire hazards or fires are caused by our citizens taking informed risks, but I believe that many more are caused this way than we commonly suppose. The person who adds gasoline to his fireplace or charcoal grill is usually in a hurry and impatient, not unaware or uncaring.
We might classify these persons as sharing the it-won’thappen-to-me attitude. They are genuinely convinced that most fires happen to the other guy, not to “people like me.” And perhaps they’re right, if we restrict our attention only to people who do actually think through the propriety of their acts.
Low priority
Many people who suffer fires are indeed the other guys, the ones who have little concern for the risks they take. As a group, they are down and out. They have little, so they have little to lose. But I would not call their attitude apathetic. Their fire-related concerns simply occupy a very low priority in their lives. In any event, high-hazard groups are no more ignorant than the rest of us about Fire prevention. They live a loose, reckless kind of life which Finds them taking serious chances routinely.
Besides these various Fire hazards created by people in their day-to-day living, we should be reminded of the reasons for many fire code violations. A theater owner locks the rear exit doors during the Friday night late show. He is neither apathetic about fire safety nor ignorant that people might be unable to escape were there a fire. Rather, he has a problem, a security problem that he solves the easiest and least expensive way available to him. In a sense he gambles—albeit with his customers’ lives—that he will not have a fire.
An owner of a building fails to recharge a portable fire extinguisher because recharging it is a bother and an expense. A builder scrimps on required fire-safety features in a new high-rise building, and neither ignorance nor apathy is operative here, usually only greed.
Conscious choice
I could go on and on with these examples which illustrate people at home and at work creating fire hazards and causing fires through conscious choice. And if we can agree that such thought processes do account for a significant portion of our fire problem, rather than the easy excuses of ignorance and apathy, what meaning does this have for people working in fire prevention and public fire safety education?
When presenting and planning our fire prevention and public education programs, we should avoid automatically assuming that our audience is apathetic or ignorant or careless. The people we address may be walking, talking fire hazards without having any of these alleged character faults. Public fire safety educators must know all they can about what motivates people if they are to have an impact on those motivations and to cause a change in an undesirable behavior. The real problems cannot be targeted until this is understood.
Lecturing people about the dangers of smoking in bed is a little like telling them that water runs downhill. Instead, let’s make better use of the precious time while we have their attention by advising them to install a smoke alarm in their bedroom. This is simply a more realistic approach to that particular fire problem.
Being realistic
And rather than boring employees with arguments that they are likely to burn their building to the ground due to their ignorance of fire hazards or to carelessness, why not approach them with the much greater possibility that an outsider might set the building on fire, or even that a neighbor might cause a fire that would spread to their property? Now the other guy becomes the problem. Obviously, either of these contingencies calls for vigilant fire prevention and escape planning. With such an approach as this, I believe we are much more likely to be listened to.
This is always my approach with groups of apartment residents. 1 applaud them for their conscientious devotion to good fire prevention habits, while suggesting that all their neighbors are pyromaniacs. This strategy not only seeems to sell many smoke alarms and escape plans, it also appeals to my listeners’ self-image and it greatly reduces the likelihood of their throwing up a defense mechanism, the it-won’thappen-to-me attitude. I would describe this approach to my audience as oblique. Rather than challenging and disapproving of the way they live and putting them on the defensive, I create a friendly, upstanding group for them to belong to: the fire-safe people, constantly on guard for the other guy who has a fire that may extend to their dwelling. I feel this approach is effective in causing behavioral change.
Who speeds?
Let me consider people’s fire-related motives from one last approach, that of a comparison with traffic safety. In recent years the police developed an ad campaign to urge citizens to obey the 55-mph speed limit. A stern officer tells viewers that the 55-mph speed limit isn’t just a good idea, it is the law. Everyone knows that people do not drive 80 mph out of ignorance of the law but because they are late or in a hurry. Thus, this public service announcement is not an example of traffic safety education because no education is taking place. In fact, this traffic safety ad campaign suggests a provocative conclusion. In much of our work to eliminate fire hazards, I wonder if we are performing education at all, at least when we are addressing adults. If accidental fires tend to be caused by people taking knowing, calculated risks, and not because they are ignorant of the hazardous nature of their acts, then they do not so much need to be educated as . . . what? Threatened? Cajoled? Convinced?
Perhaps sold in a marketing sense. Our fire prevention task should focus riot on teaching safe behaviors but on persuading people to give up some unsafe behavior. And this is a significant difference. Were our audiences only in need of information—the facts—to become safer, then all we would have to do is communicate that information, to teach. But if a lack of knowledge is not the crux of the problem, we must devise other ways, other approaches to cause change in the reckless ways that people live.
