Popular Mechanics: Home Improvement

Safe at Home

By Roy Berendsohn

Lowe’s takes its home-safety show on the road.

Home may be where the heart is, but it’s also the place where you’re most likely to be hurt. That shouldn’t be surprising given that, even in this seemingly rootless age, we still spend a good deal of time at home working, eating, sleeping, and playing.

The world’s second-largest home-improvement retailer, 54-year-old Lowe’s, has embarked on an ambitious project to show homeowners how dangerous their homes can be—and how to make them safer. It’s also trying to make the point with children. Lowe’s cites the following statistics from the National Safety Council, National Center for Injury Prevention, and the Consumer Federation of America:

1. American homes are the scene of 20,000 accidental deaths and 6 million disabling injuries every year.
2. Every two hours, someone dies in a fire.
3. Roughly 180 children (ages 14 and younger) die yearly in falling accidents.
4. Approximately 200,000 emergency room visits occur every year relating to yard and garden tools and equipment occur every year.
5. Accidents with ladders account for 150,000 injuries a year.
   

Grim statistics, indeed. Lowe’s has taken a double-track public-information approach to make the home a safer place. One effort it calls Lowe’s Great Safety Adventure, an entertaining child-level view of home safety. The adventure involves a pair of tractor trailers that convert into an entertaining home-safety demonstration in which children are led through a series of home-safety simulations, even an evacuation from an artificial-smoke-filled room. An actor wearing a dog suit and calling himself Rover, the home-safety hound, participates and leads children in home-safety exercises. The two trucks visit Lowe’s stores, schools, and other public sites.

The $5 million project was slated to make stops in approximately half the continental states in 2000. The company says that in 1999, the project’s first year, approximately 100,000 children in 100 cities attended its safety programs. You can learn more about the project by visiting the company’s well-done home-safety site: www.loweshomesafety.com.

In terms of adult information, the site’s Safety Tips Encyclopedia covers 24 topics, ranging from Air Quality and How to Build Hurricane Shutters to a Red Cross Disaster Guide. If you click on Lawn and Garden Safety tips, for example, five topics are addressed: tools, pesticides, pool chemicals, bees and wasps, and sun protection.

Copyright © Popular Mechanics 2001. Reprinted by permission.

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