photo by: Joanna Hlavacek

Mark Campbell, an engineer with the Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical Department, helps Quail Run Elementary School first-grader Phillip Salazar out of a smoke-filled trailer Friday at the school. Firefighters visited Quail Run that day as part of a series of educational school visits going on this month.

Talib Muwwakkil, a firefighter with the Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical Department, didn’t put out any real fires Friday at Quail Run Elementary School.

Instead, Muwwakkil and a handful of his fellow firefighters spent the morning extinguishing a few fire-safety myths with Quail Run first-graders.

After learning how to safely exit a burning building and call 911, the kids put their newly acquired knowledge to the test in an activity designed to simulate the experience of being inside a smoke-filled home.

“You never want to go under your bed when there’s a fire,” Muwwakkil instructed the group of students huddled inside the specially equipped trailer. “What you want to do is get close to a window, OK?”

October is Fire Safety Month, and in observance of the occasion, Fire Department personnel are visiting local schools to teach kids what to do in the event of a fire. The idea, they say, is to educate kids early — and often, since the Fire Department offers similar programs for fifth-graders, high schoolers and college students — on how to “get down, stay down and get out” in the event of a fire.

Some kids are a little nervous entering the Fire Department’s trailer, Muwwakkil said. The “smoke” pumped in by a fog machine fills the already-claustrophobic space, creating a disorienting, vision-obscuring effect not unlike actual smoke.

Pete Eastwood, a captain in the Fire Department and a longtime veteran of its school visits, said the nerves are normal. They’re also an effective tool in teaching young people the importance of common-sense fire safety.

“Well, see, that’s good, because it gets them to understand this is dangerous,” Eastwood said. “If they get a little nervous right here, then they’ll know what it feels like in a real situation, but they know that they can still get out and get away. Even if they’re scared, they can still get out and get away.”

But having firefighters walk them through the activity, he said, seems to put the kids at ease. They might even have a little fun in the process.

The message seemed to stick with first-grader Benjamin Florence. For the record, he claims he wasn’t scared during the exercise.

“I learned that it’s really smoky in a building and that we should get out fast,” Florence said.