This year's recipient of the Home Safety Council's Fire Safety Education Hero Award is Lt. Peggy Harrell, the fire safety education coordinator for the Plano (Texas) Fire Department. Harrell was presented with the award during the Congressional Fire Services Institute's National Fire and Emergency Services Banquet, held April 6 in Washington, D.C.

The award recognizes the outstanding efforts of individuals who work to teach the public how to prevent and respond to home fires and how to reduce the risk of fire, burn and other preventable home injuries. Harrell is credited with providing the fire-safety instruction that helped a student prevent serious injury when an apartment fire broke out.

What's your reaction to receiving the award?

What an honor. I'm so proud — not of myself, but of the program that we put together and how the team just flew with it. I don't believe I've ever been involved with more dynamic people. And Maria Diaz, the student, was just super. What she did is what I'm so proud of.

What were the circumstances?

Early in 2004 we became part of a pilot [Home Safety Council] national project to teach fire-safety basics to adults with low literacy skills. It really fit well with a literacy group our department already had a relationship with here in Plano called Even Start, a family literacy program that is run through the Plano Independent School District.

One of the things that came up in the classroom once we had the program rolling was the use of fire extinguishers. We had been discussing extinguishers and the students told us they were interested in learning how to use them. I had been thinking about offering some training sessions at the firehouse when coincidently, and entirely unexpectedly, our local Lowe's store contacted me wondering how it might become involved in our public-education efforts. So I said, “How about if we set up a training class where the families can come to the station, and the adults could learn how to use extinguishers, and you could donate an extinguisher to each family?” Lowe's thought it was a great idea.

So we scheduled a training session. It was a Saturday morning, we had good weather and the families showed up, and the kids toured the fire engines and ambulances while their parents learned how to use the extinguishers. And after they finished the training, the people from Lowe's handed each family a Kidde fire extinguisher.

A few months later, there was a graduation ceremony scheduled for the students who had been through the Even Start program. One of those students, Maria Diaz, brought a neighbor, Sandra Jones, with her. Sandra went up to the directors of the program and said, “I had to come with Maria today to tell you she saved my life!” And this woman went on to explain that some medication she had taken before she started cooking dinner at home had made her a little groggy, so she had laid down, not planning to fall asleep, but did. What she had left cooking on the stovetop caught fire. The smoke alarm went off, but she was still kind of dazed and wasn't sure what was going on. Maria heard the alarm, went to her apartment and got her donated fire extinguisher, and used it to put out the kitchen fire.

We were all proud of Maria, and Sandra was so proud of her, too. So I called [HSC President] Meri-K [Appy] to let her know we'd had a save, and we've just been grinning ever since.

Can you give us a sense of the scope of the overall public-education effort you coordinate through the Plano Fire Department?

We do well over 600 programs a year, with the core being classroom visits. Plano has 45 elementary schools and 12 middle schools. I'd estimate in excess of 40,000 people come into contact with one of our programs each year.…

Quite a body of work. But what are the challenges yet to be met that you feel are most important?

Total community risk reduction. The fire service faces cultural, social and economic barriers with the high-risk populations that we serve. We know there are families out there that are having to choose between paying bills or buying smoke alarms, that are heating their homes by turning their stoves on and lighting the oven and opening the door. I know there are families that have had to burn candles because they couldn't pay their electric bills. And we have so many people here from other countries, countries where there is not the emphasis and level of importance placed on safety in the home that there is here. And while the fire service recognizes these barriers, we have to be more proactive with this segment of the community, not just recognize the likelihood that we'll wind up fighting a fire there.