By Bonnie Culverhouse

It’s the holiday season – time to cook those big family meals. It’s also colder outside, which means heating systems are, well, heating up.

One other thing is heating up, according to Minden Fire Chief Brian Williams … house fires.

“We see half of our structure fire responses in the months of November, December and January– a 200 percent increase,” Williams said.

Minden Fire Department is providing free smoke detectors for Operation-Save-A-Life, Williams reminded members of the City Council Monday.

“We keep roughly two dozen on hand and when we run low, we contact the State Fire Marshal to get additional detectors,” he said.

The detectors are provided to departments by the Louisiana State Fire Marshal.

“If there’s anybody inside the city – or outside the city limits, if their department doesn’t have any – they can always come to us and we will provide them with one, free of charge,” he added.

Williams said space heaters and small electric heaters can be pinpointed as causes of many house fires this time of year.

“People will use a space heater with an extension cord, and you are not supposed to do that,” he said. They should be plugged directly into a wall outlet. Sometimes folk overload a wall (plug) and, for whatever reason, their electrical system won’t trip to keep it from overheating.”

Cooking is sometimes an issue, too, but if a person sets off the smoke alarm while cooking, “that means the smoke alarm is doing its job,” Williams said.

During the month of November, Minden Fire Department responded to the following:
* 4 structure fires, 2 of which were commercial buildings.
* 3 miscellaneous fires
* 9 public service calls
* 4 rescue calls
* 1 water rescue call
* 1 hazmat call
* 9 false alarms
* 6 fire/smoke alarms

“We’ve had several fatalities across north Louisiana over the last few weeks,” Williams added. “We just want to do all we can to prevent that.”

Smoke detectors may be picked up at Fire Station No. 1, 1213 Sheppard Street in Minden or call 318-371-4232.