Missoula Fire Marshall Reminds Citizens to Change Batteries in Smoke Detectors

Did you remember to change your clocks on Sunday? How about the batteries in your smoke detectors? Missoula City Assistant Fire Marshall Dax Frasier said batteries need to be changed about every six months and Daylight Savings Time is a good a reminder. Those new batteries could save a life.

"Working smoking detectors will wake you up out of a sleep," Frasier said. "When a person is asleep they tend not to have a sense of smell, but they still hear things... especially something annoying like a smoke detector. Prior to smoke detectors becoming kind of common in the 70's there were almost twice as many deaths in the country."

Frasier says the number of lives saved is in the thousands.

"It was under the Nixon administration in the early 70's that there were in the United States, I think, around 7,000 deaths a year from fire. As soon as smoke detectors became common, the death rate has been cut in half, to about 3500 people a year."

We are “springing forward” now, but it will be time to “fall back” in about six months, so syncing battery replacement with Daylight Savings Time ensures that batteries get replaced on schedule.