Rely on Your Smoke Alarm - Not Luck

A family in Sheffield were lucky to escape without injuries after their house filled with smoke in the early hours of this morning.

At 1:35am, South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue received a call from the family's teenage son, stating that he had come home to find the ground floor of the house filled with smoke.  The rest of his family was asleep upstairs.

Control operators advised the boy to raise the alarm, get out of the property quickly and wait for crews to attend the house, which is on Vincent Road in the Sharrow area of the city.

The two fire crews from Central Fire Station arrived to find that a burning joss stick had been placed in a plant pot in the living room and had subsequently smouldered, causing a large amount of smoke to fill the house.

Crew Manager Shaun Dobson said that they could easily have been dealing with a fire, and potential injuries, had the boy not arrived to raise the alarm:  "The property wasn't fitted with smoke alarms.  If the lad hadn't come in at that time, the story could have been very different."

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