By Phil Egan for First Monday Magazine

This summer, I had to relive my sister’s death all over again.

I read both the Sarnia Observer, and the Sarnia Gazette accounts of the fire that took
her life in the wee hours of that cold January morning. I stopped my research into the
history of the Sarnia fire department for a few minutes to put my head down on my desk
and weep.

It was such a colossal loss for me, my parents, and my eight remaining brothers and
sisters. It’s been thirty-one years, but the pain of Frances’ death is still fresh and raw. “In
time, all sorrows fade,” are the words inscribed on her gravestone. “But memories grow
fonder.”

My memories are fond, but my sorrow has not yet faded. And the whole tragic episode
was completely unnecessary.

For us, there was no warning. One moment my 24-year-old sister was alive, vibrant,
and enjoying life, having just moved into her own first apartment three weeks earlier.
The next thing I knew, I was tramping across the snow-covered expanse of Our Lady of
Mercy Cemetery, trying to find Frances a new home.

In researching the history of Sarnia Fire Rescue for my book, Walking Through Fire:
The History of Sarnia’s Bravest, I found several tales of tragedy both before, and after
Frances’ death in an unprotected home. As a result of the work of the Frances Egan
Foundation following her death in 1985, a civic bylaw was enacted requiring the
installation of smoke alarms in every Sarnia home.

But it makes me wonder. How many smoke alarms are installed across this city today,
their presence giving confidence and assurance to homeowners, while their batteries
are actually as dead as Frances?

Four months before my sister died on Davis Street in a house in which faulty wiring
ignited in the middle of the night, deadly fire had taken the life of another young lady in
her 20s. The house had been equipped with a smoke detector, but dead batteries
meant that there was no screaming alarm to rouse her from her sleep.

As Deputy Fire Chief Jim Knight stood in front of the home’s charred remains in the
morning, he told a reporter: “There is no guesswork involved here. There was a smoke
detector but it was malfunctioning due to a dead battery. Had it been working, there
would not have been a fatality.”

Without even realizing it, that young woman chose a quiet death instead of a rude
awakening by the shrill scream of an active smoke detector.

Almost three weeks to the day following the death of my sister, headlines in the Sarnia
Observer bannered, “Six Escape City Fire.”

Almost three weeks to the day following the death of my sister, headlines in the Sarnia
Observer bannered, “Six Escape City Fire.” A screaming smoke alarm had wakened six people
in a Blanche Street apartment fire. If there had been no smoke alarm, Owen
Forsythe of the Sarnia Fire Department told a reporter, there would have been fatalities.

In late November of the following year, a smoke detector saved the life of a woman in a
fire in a Michigan Avenue apartment building. Three others in the building were not so
fortunate, and lost their lives. One of the dead was also a young woman in her 20s.

There is a painfully obvious solution to all of this mayhem and desolation.

Twice a year, in the spring and in the fall, Sarnia firefighters ask you to change the
batteries in your smoke alarms. Having dead batteries in a smoke detector is the same
as having no smoke detector at all. If your batteries are not fresh, know this. It could be
your brother searching cemetery grounds, writing an obituary and talking to funeral
directors on your behalf tomorrow.

Take it from one who is still recovering from a thirty-one year-old loss. Change the
batteries in your smoke detector when the time changes next month.

Don’t forget. Choose a rude awakening over a quiet death