Prevent fire hazards

Benefit of solar-powered LED lights: Prevent fire hazards by replacing kerosene lights.

Imagine you live in a wooden or stick-and-mud house and one second of not paying attention to your light source can burn your house and create life-long scars on your skin.

Kerosene and candles cause countless fire catastrophes every year. There were 282,000 deaths from fire-related burns worldwide in 1998, and 96% of these fatalities were in developing countries. In India alone, 2.5 million people (350,000 of them children) suffer severe burns each year, primarily due to overturned kerosene lamps. Each year, many homes burn to the ground when a lamp is toppled. (SELF Newsletter)

Fire in the Serengeti. This one was on purpose, many others are not so lucky…

In the western world we hardly remember the time when kerosene lamps were used out of necessity rather than decorative style/choice.

Still only a centure ago, kerosene lamps were used a lot and were a leading cause of fire in the USA:

Kerosene was also a fire risk; in 1880, nearly two of every five New York City fires were caused by defective kerosene lamps (Bettmann 1974)

But in the developing world, this is still true:

KEROSENE LAMPS ARE MAIN CAUSE OF FIRE IN IFUGAO

LAGAWE, Ifugao (Phillipines)-As the nation celebrates Fire Prevention Month this March, the Bureau of Fire Protection here bared that most of the cases of fire in the province last year were blamed on kerosene lamps.

Senior Fire Officer 1 Jonathan Sarol said that of the nine houses burned in 2009, most were attributed to kerosene lamps that were accidentally kicked by a family member while sleeping (link).

Of course, kerosene lamps are used by the same billions of people that have never heard of such as thing as a sprinkler system, smoke alarm or even a fire extuinguisher.

Once there is a fire, often the entire house and its contents burn down. Besides material damage, also the health damage due to smoke inhalation and skin burns (or much worse) is considerable.

Flexiway Solar’s Solar Muscle solar-powered LED lights have lightened up the Kokoda Track, PNG

The risks are huge and the solution is simple and effective: replace kerosene lamps with our solar-powered LED lights.

See also this page about why usage of kerosene lamps causes many danger & risk aspects that can and will lead to fires.

Again: the solution is so simple, it almost seems crazy that is has not been implemented worldwide: just use a solar-powered LED light and all of these horrible risks disappear in a flash. We -and many other good projects like ours- will not stop until all lamps are replaced.