Home Safety Resources (03)

Safety from Thunderstorms and Tornados
These pages offer safety tips for tornados and thunderstorms. It says there are 2,000 storms on the earth's surface at any given time and lightening strikes the earth approximately 100 times a second. Safety tips are offered for learning to reduce your lightning risk through outdoor and home lightning safety. The best way to avoid lightning is not put yourself, family, and friends in danger in the first place. No one should be caught off guard by thunderstorms. Weather information is all around you. Know the lighting safety-warning program in your area, and use the 30/30 rule by counting seconds between lightning strikes. Staying away from water, open spaces and trees is also important, and safety tips for boaters and swimmers as well as hikers and golfers are included.

Get the Facts About Asbestos from the EPA
This section on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website is all about asbestos and why you need to be concerned about possible exposure hazards. It explains what asbestors is, where it can be found, how people can be exposed to it, and the potential health effects of being exposed. You'll learn what you can do to protect your family. Find out about naturally-occurring asbestos, what to do if you discover asbestos in your home, and where to find a testing facility. There are also links to laws and regulations about asbestos. Included, as well, are sections concerning school buildings (federal requirements and resources for schools and parents) and for building owners a managers (renovation and demolition requirements, operations and maintenance guidance).

Fire Safety Checklist for Older Consumers
This Fire Safety Checklist for Older Consumers, a 12-page booklet in PDF format, was developed by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), an independent regulatory agency of the U.S. Government. A home fire is one of the most devastating and potentially most tragic occurrences that a homeowner can face. This site contains a checklist of things that you can do to help reduce the chance of a fire in your home or, if a fire should strike, to increase the chances for you and your family to survive. The checklist includes sources of fire, such as wood stoves, recommendations for using wood stoves and kerosene heaters in the safest manner possible, the proper way to use electric heaters, a checklist of cooking equipment, such as gas stoves and electric ranges (did you know that there are approximately 400 deaths and 5,000 injuries each year from the improper use of cooking equipment?), a checklist on cigarette lighters and matches, a checklist of flammable materials in the home, and much more. By reading through this checklist the average homeowner will undoubtedly find ways to improve the fire safety of his home and improve the chances that he and his family will survive if the unthinkable should happen.

Injury Prevention & Control from the U.S. CDC
The section on the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDA) is about injury and violence prevention in the U.S. It provides data and statistics through the CDC's WISQARS (Web-based INjury Statistic Query and Reporting System), an interactive online datebase that provides fata and nonfatal injury, violent death and cost of injury data from many sources. There also section on home and recreational safety, motor vehicle safety, prescription drug overdose, traumatic brain injury (concussion prvention, response and resources) and violence prevention, including child abuse and neglect, sexual violence, suicide and more. In each of these resources, information is provided for specific age groups, i.e., older adults, children and teenagers.