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How many of you have actually taken a few minutes to test your smoke & CO detectors? I replace the batteries and test mine every New Year's Day and every late summer/early fall (around the beginning to middle of Sept) when I clean and test fire the heaters while I have time to make any repairs I may need BEFORE the heaters are needed. I have the expiration date written on the outside edge of each of the alarms where I can see it without removing the alarm.
How many have made sure you have safe egress from inside your camper? And I don't mean having to move a stack of boxes or containers of last season's clothing or similar. A camper, no matter how big and "well-built" goes up in just a few minutes.
I've been in two parks that had a camper catch fire. The first one was sitting in a site with no one in adjacent sites. But the fire burned so hot that a camper two sites away (one empty site between them) lost all the windows on the side facing the burning camper. The camper on the opposite side with three sites between them had exterior sidewall damage and their plastic chairs that were in front of the camper, melted. I don't know what kind it was. It came in late at night and it was a melted mess by lunchtime the following day. I never saw what it looked like and I couldn't tell what it was afterwards. We left the following day.
The second fire was bad. The fifth wheel was just gone and we all watched it happen. There were three little dogs inside. The owners were taking a shower in the bathhouse. At the time, we had more pet owners in our park than non-pet owners. About 6 of the guys tried to get the dogs out by putting a ladder against one of the bedroom windows and breaking the window out. The dogs were too frightened to leave the camper. We could hear them barking, until they stopped. The smoke was so thick and black inside that nothing could be seen. I dearly hope the dogs died from the smoke. We were all EXTREMEMLY lucky in that the fiver was at the east end of the row and the wind was blowing west to east. Otherwise the whole park would have gone up in minutes. All we would have had time to do was get the people and pets out of the rest of the campers. Some of us took the extra measure of putting our pets and important papers in our cars and moved them to the overflow parking area. This would allow us to help others. Luckily the rest of the park was safe. The owners had a parabolic radiant LP heater sitting on a 20LB LP cylinder INSIDE the fiver as their heat source. None of us knew it. The fire dept hauled it out the next day. Nothing was reported in the local news paper. If it's not in the newspaper, it didn't happen. So no links to the last fire.