BRUNSWICK

The make-shift house was full of smoke as a dozen children crawled low on hands and knees through the door to a window where they yelled for help before climbing down a drop ladder.

The evacuation from the smoke house, a collective grant-funded education tool that travels to open houses around the region, was one of the many activities taking place at the ever-growing open house during Fire Prevention Week at Brunswick Fire Department.

The event takes place at Emerson Station on Bath Road, which allows the department to grow the program, have more displays and activities and more people since it was held at the central station.

Joshua Shean is a firefighter paramedic for Brunswick but he is also one of the department’s three fire and life safety educators — along with Dan Brown and John Faith — who go into the elementary and preschools in town to work with children.

Fire Prevention Week was established to commemorate the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 that killed more than 250 people, left 100,000 homeless, destroyed more than 17,400 structures and burned more than 2,000 acres.

Even in Maine, Shean said there was a large brush fire in the early 1900s that burned about one-third of the state.

Prevention work is hard to measure with numbers but is invaluable. There are times during house fires when it has been the children who have told their parents to get out of the house, so one benefit the department has seen is children teaching the parents. There has also been a decrease in juvenile experimentation type fires.

Most of the children have seen fire educators before in their school so the smoke house allows them to reinforce what they’ve already taught kids with exit drills in the home. Two exits out, crawl low under smoke and get out and stay out are the major message points they try to drive home for the children.

The open house not only gets families in to have fun, but to say, “This is all for you,” Shean said. “The emphasis on safety — having the dispatchers, railroad safety, CMP and natural gas — it’s all there because we’re here to bring people together and to be that community fire house.”

They do the “friendly monster” at schools in October where they put on their gear for children, who have just dressed up for Halloween, to break down that barrier so children won’t be scared if they do come face to face with a firefighter in gear during an emergency or fire.

The department is also working on developing a senior safety program focusing on independent living facilities in town. They are getting out to those areas to talk about fire safety and cooking safety. Cooking fires are the cause of 40 percent of house fires and the leading cause of burns in the home.

What it comes down to, Shean said, “is having a big community event to get people in here and getting the safety messages out as much as we can.”

dmoore@timesrecord.com