Cooking fires are the leading cause of home fires, so the Honolulu Fire Department is sharing tips to reduce your risk as part of Fire Prevention Week.
Capt. Cris Bartolome with HFD's Community Relations and Education Office said you should keep young children and pets at a safe distance in the kitchen — but most importantly, eliminate any potential distractions.
"So if you're cooking and you get a text and you walk off to address the text or you're watching TV and you hear something going on on the TV and you go watch TV, and then pretty soon they forget about what they were doing in the kitchen. We’ve been to a lot of fires where they truly forgot that they were cooking something," he told The Conversation.
"We tell people you need to remain in the kitchen when you're cooking, stay there. If you have to leave, you have to turn off the stove."
Bartolome also shared tips on how to keep your house safe from embers during wildfires: Clean out dry leaves and needles from rain gutters, block open spaces beneath your house with fire-resistant material, and use flame-resistant material the next time you replace your roof.
"What we saw on Maui was a combination of the fuels, the way the weather was, the topography. The wind plays a very huge part in it. So here on Oʻahu, we have dry conditions on the west side... So of course, what you saw there can happen here because we have the same thing," he said.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Oct. 10, 2023. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
