The grant will focus on developing both a standardized training curriculum for campus fire safety officials and materials they can use in delivering this training to the 17 million students enrolled in colleges and universities across the nation.
“This is the first training program of its kind on a national level and it will provide these officials with invaluable tools to help ensure that students receive the life-saving information that they need,” said Ed Comeau, director of the non-profit Center for Campus Fire Safety. “What students learn about fire safety will impact them not only while they are in school, but for the rest of their lives, long after they graduate. The goal is to instill life-long fire safety behaviors that will reduce the 3,900 fire deaths that occur in all occupancies across the nation each year.”
Working with the Center on this project will be UL University, the training division of Underwriters Laboratories Inc. (UL), one of the world’s largest and oldest not-for-profit product safety testing and certification organizations. UL University brings to the partnership a tremendous amount of expertise in instructional design, instructor development and the development of training materials.
The award of this grant comes at a time when there have been a number of significant and tragic fires across the nation in student housing.
The two victims in Pittsburg are the fifth and sixth fire fatalities in student housing this academic year. In addition to the fire that killed David Ellis, two students died in an off-campus fire in Raleigh, N.C., and another student was killed in Lawrence, Kan., in October.
Nationwide, 84 people have been killed in student housing since January 2000, as identified by the Center. Almost 80 percent of the fire fatalities have occurred in off-campus student housing such as rented houses and apartments. Common factors in a number of these fires include:
According to the Center, April and May, followed by August and September, are the two most dangerous periods of time for student housing fire fatalities. Last year, September was designated as National Campus Fire Safety Month to help raise the national awareness of campus fire safety and for the first time since January 2000, no student housing fire deaths occurred during August and September.
More information on campus fire safety can be found at the Center’s Web site.
