As you know better than I do, fire departments wage daily battles not just against fires, EMS calls and the risk of personnel injury. You face increasing drains on already-restricted resources; stretching time, money and energy to a nearly impossible degree.

Let me make your job just a little bit tougher. There is an emerging public safety challenge you may not realize exists: low literacy. In the United States, 90 million people have limited reading skills; of those, 44 million have extremely limited skills, reading at the lowest level. Chances are, your community is affected.

Why is this of concern to the fire service? People with low literacy skills lack the ability to read materials as simple as a food or prescription label. Comprehending the directions on a space heater, the warning label on a gasoline container, or perhaps your department's fire safety brochures can be impossible, with potentially disastrous consequences.

So add the low-literacy population to your ever-growing to-do list. Because if you don't intentionally target this audience, a key segment of your community will fail to receive the safety messages you and your staff work so hard to deliver. And although your department's public education resources are no doubt already tapped out, this is an audience you can't afford to miss.

To make the issue even more concerning, literacy problems parallel factors related to higher fire risk. According to ProLiteracy America, the largest adult literacy organization in the country, adults with literacy problems are less likely than others to have smoke alarms, fire extinguishers and first-aid kits in their homes. NFPA reports that half of all home fire deaths occur in the tiny share (6%) of homes that lack smoke alarms.

Older adults and preschoolers share the highest fire death rate, roughly twice that of the population at large. According to the National Council on Aging, 71% of Americans ages 60 and over have low reading skills.

NFPA data show poverty and education (below the poverty level and lacking a high school diploma) are highly correlated with U.S. fire death rates. Immigrant poverty is growing rapidly, according to ProLiteracy America, which tracked a 123% increase in the number of poor households headed by immigrants from 1979-97. U.S. Bureau of Census data show that about 3.4 million older adults were below the poverty level in 2001: 8.9% of elderly whites were poor, compared with about 21.9% of elderly African-Americans and 21.8% of elderly Hispanics.

A sample program

Literacy and low literacy need to be on every chief's radar screen. Although many fire departments have made significant strides in targeting high-risk and multicultural segments of their communities, if you look at the typical fire safety materials distributed today, you'll see text-heavy brochures often written only in English. Departments that exclusively use these written materials for conveying safety advice run the risk of excluding a critical segment of their communities.

Your department is most likely serving both low-literacy English-speaking populations and low-literacy populations who speak English as a second language. How can fire chiefs address this important segment of their communities with already-strapped budgets and resources?

The ideal solution is to get involved with cross-functional, innovative, community-based safety education programs that target high-risk audiences with appropriate delivery mechanisms. Enter Alina Bueno, with the Harbor — UCLA Research Education Institute's Childhood Injury Prevention Center. As assistant director, Bueno spearheaded the center's Promotora program in the Los Angeles area communities where the center had already been working through the Injury Free Coalition for Kids.

“We're building on the strengths already in place in the community,” Bueno says. Working with the Los Angeles City and County Fire Departments, as well as others, Bueno's Promotora program recruits parents within the communities where the center has already done outreach and trains them to become promotoras — community health promoters — teaching safety to other parents, in their own language. “The promotoras are from their own community, have similar backgrounds and understand them, so they are able to reach and educate these populations,” Bueno says.

Just one of many pioneering community-based efforts to reach all sectors of the population with safety messages, the Los Angeles area Promotora home safety program is funded by the Home Safety Council. Bueno says the model, which began in Latin America, has gained popularity in the United States and works especially well where Spanish is the primary language. Fire safety and all aspects of community safety and health can be effectively addressed through programs like Promotora.

Failing to reach the low-literacy populations isn't a symptom of head-in-the-sand syndrome. The sad truth is that most U.S. fire departments don't have the resources they need to do all that they need to do every day. Yet, while chiefs aren't intentionally ignoring their low-literacy populations, they often are juggling competing programs. Low literacy rarely wins out. What they need are programs like the Promotora model to help them stretch their safety education dollars.

So what's a chief to do? If you don't have access to an Alina Bueno in your city, there is still something that your department can do today to begin reaching low literacy audiences with safety messages.

To learn more about both injury prevention and literacy programs, log on to these helpful sites:

• Injury Free Coalition for Kids at www.injuryfree.org will help you locate a program near you.
• Literacy Volunteers of America at www.literacyvolunteers.org reveals a network of local, state and regional literacy providers.
• ProLiteracy America has a comprehensive list of online resources and programs in your area at www.proliteracy.org.

In general, low literacy tends to reduce people's chances for employment, good health and safety, while higher literacy skills correlate with better health, higher earnings and increased safety. By teaming up with literacy volunteers and other outreach groups in your area, you can increase the saturation of your fire safety messages, empower the low-literacy community with safety information, and expand the team of advocates working with your department on public safety outreach. That's a win-win solution for everyone.

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Meri-K Appy is president of the Home Safety Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing home injuries.