Cooking campaign spreads kitchen fire safety advice across Southampton
The Southampton Recipe for Success COOK campaign is now in full swing, and our community safety team and crews have been busy sharing kitchen fire safety tips at venues and events across the city.
Over the past few weeks, members of our Community Safety team and firefighters have visited venues across Southampton to help encourage safer cooking and remind residents to ‘turn off the heat before they eat’. They’ve also been giving out free recipe booklets, fridge magnets and egg-timers as a prompt to encourage people to ‘Keep looking when cooking’.
50% of all accidental fires in the home across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight over the last few years started in the kitchen. When life gets busy it’s easy for everyone to get distracted, so with the Recipe for Success COOK campaign, we want to remind the community to stay alert when cooking.
Lone pensioners were involved in over a third of these cooking-related fires, so the targeted campaign is aimed at over 65s in the Southampton area, whilst also hoping to raise public awareness of kitchen fire safety to help prevent incidents and near-misses.
So far, the teams have visited groups from Age UK Southampton, Senior Saints Foundation and shoppers at Asda, Marlands and Sainsbury’s in Lordshill, Southampton. Campaign recipe booklets have also been given to food banks and world food stores across the city.
We hope to simplify kitchen safety for Southampton residents as well as other members of the community across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, with our easy to remember list of ingredients:
CLEAR – Keep tea towels, cloths and electrical leads away from the oven and hob.
OVEN – Switch off the oven and hob when you’ve finished cooking and remove pans from the heat.
OIL – A build-up of cooking oil/grease can increase the risk of cooking fires so clean regularly.
KEEP – Keep looking when cooking.
All resources have kindly been funded by Community Interest Company 3SFire, who have sponsored the new Southampton campaign.
If you haven’t already, it’s not too late to come along and visit us for some kitchen safety goodies to help with safer cooking. Our teams will be at the Southampton Mela festival on Saturday 12 July or Tesco Extra in Bursledon on Tuesday 2 September and Wednesday 3 September, 10am-4pm
If you run a community group aimed at older people in the Southampton area, HIWFRS would love to hear from you. If you’d like to request a free kitchen fire safety talk, please email community.firesafety@hantsfire.gov.uk
If all that talk of cooking has left you hungry, you can visit the Recipe for Success area of the HIWFRS website to download some free recipe cards, watch cooking safety videos or for more top tips.
Did you know we offer free home fire safety visits to over 65s to offer advice and support with all areas of home fire safety including kitchen safety? You can find out more about the free visits here.
Comments (0)