Prevention lowers the odds, but it never gets them to zero, so the second half of before is about the two things that decide what happens when a fire starts anyway. The first is early warning, because the two minutes we keep talking about are counted from the moment you know. An alarm that sounds early gives you the whole window. An alarm that does not sound at all gives you the window that starts when you wake up choking, which is usually too late. The second is a plan you have walked, because under stress people do not think, they execute whatever they have practised. This lesson covers where alarms go, how to keep them working, and how to build and rehearse an escape plan. These are the two highest-value things in the entire class, and between them they cost almost nothing.

Start with the most cost-effective safety device you will ever own. Working smoke alarms cut the risk of dying in a reported home fire by roughly half. There is no other purchase available to a household that changes survival odds by that much for that little. But read the sentence carefully, because every word in it is load-bearing. Working. Most homes that suffer a fire death did have alarms; the alarms had dead batteries, or had been removed after a cooking false alarm and never put back, or were older than the ten-year service life and had quietly stopped detecting. An alarm on a shelf in the garage protects nobody. An alarm with the battery taken out to stop the chirping is worse than no alarm, because the household believes it is protected. So the useful question is not whether you have smoke alarms. It is when you last heard each one sound.

Placement is about coverage, and the standard is more thorough than most homes are. Put a smoke alarm inside every bedroom, because a closed door that protects you from smoke also stops you hearing an alarm in the hallway. Put one outside each separate sleeping area. Put one on every level of the home, including the basement and including a finished attic, since a fire that starts below you will reach you last and warn you last. On the ceiling if you can, or high on a wall if you cannot, because smoke rises. Keep them at least ten feet from a cooking appliance to cut down on false alarms, which is worth doing for a practical reason: the alarm people disable is almost always the one that goes off every time they make toast. And if you can, interconnect them, whether by wire or wirelessly, so that when one detects smoke every alarm in the house sounds. In a two-storey home that difference alone can be most of your escape window.

Alarms are the one piece of safety equipment that fails silently, so they need a maintenance rhythm rather than good intentions. Month, year, decade. Every month, press the test button on each alarm until it sounds, which takes about ten seconds per unit and is the only way to know the horn and the sensor both still work. Every year, replace the battery, unless the unit is a sealed ten-year alarm, in which case leave it alone. Every ten years, replace the alarm itself, counting from the manufacture date printed on the back rather than from when you installed it. Sensors degrade, and a fifteen-year-old alarm can pass its own test button while no longer reliably detecting smoke. One more thing. A chirping alarm is telling you something specific, usually a low battery or an expired unit. The correct response is a new battery or a new alarm. The response that gets people killed is taking it down to make the noise stop and meaning to deal with it later.

Now the plan, which has four parts and takes about twenty minutes to build. First, walk through your home and find two ways out of every room, normally the door and a window. Check that the second way actually works, meaning the window opens, you can reach it, security bars have an interior release, and anybody who sleeps in that room could get through it. Second, agree one meeting place outside, at a fixed landmark a safe distance from the building, like a specific tree or the neighbour's driveway. Not just outside. A named spot, so that counting heads takes seconds. Third, make sure everyone knows to call nine one one from outside, not from inside while looking for a phone. Fourth, and this is the part almost everybody skips, practise it twice a year, and make one of those practices a night drill. Children in particular can sleep through a smoke alarm, and a night drill is how you find that out on an evening when it does not matter.

Before moving on, picture the room where you sleep tonight. What are your two ways out of it? If the second one is a window, could you actually get through it, in the dark, in whatever you sleep in? And where would your household gather outside so that you would know within seconds whether everyone was there? If you cannot answer those three questions immediately, that is not a failure. It is the most useful thing this class will tell you, and it takes one evening to fix. Most people find that the answer to the second way out is a window they have never opened, and that the meeting place has never been agreed with the other people who live there. A plan that exists only in one person's head is not a household plan.