WINONA LAKE - The Winona Lake Fire Department has been presented with a Life Safety Achievement Award for 1999 by the Residential Fire Safety Institute.

The award was announced by RFSI executive director Patrick Coughlin. RFSI is a public interest group dedicated to reducing residential fire deaths and injuries by promoting the use of fire sprinklers, smoke alarms and fire-safe behavior.

The Life Safety Achievement Award recognizes local fire prevention activities that contributed to reducing the number of lives lost in residential fires. Winona Lake Fire Department qualified for the award because it recorded no fire deaths in structures during 1999. Although residential fires in the U.S. account for only 20 percent of all fires, they result in 80 percent of fire deaths.

Winona Lake Fire Department volunteer Mike Cox said the award was basically for having a fatality-free year of fires.

"It's a good department and we do a lot of training and fire prevention programs," said Cox. "It's been many years since we've had a fire fatality in Winona."

One of the programs the fire department does is bring students of Jefferson Elementary School to the department to show them the equipment and explain how the department works, said Cox. This is done every year during Fire Prevention Week in October.

"Experience tells us that fire prevention activity and public education can significantly reduce life and property loss from residential fires," said Coughlin. "Prevention and education are very cost-effective compared to the traditional approach of relying on fire suppression. The Life Safety Achievement Award recognizes fire departments for their fire prevention efforts and encourages them to continually improve those efforts." [[In-content Ad]]