Home fire · 10 minutes · then 20 minutes with your household
Your grandparents had fifteen minutes to get out. You have about two.
Nothing about fire changed. Your furniture did. Sofas, mattresses, curtains and electronics are now mostly plastics and foam, which means they ignite faster, burn hotter and produce dense toxic smoke instead of the slow smoulder of wood and wool. A room that once took twenty minutes to become deadly can do it in three — and it is the smoke, not the flames, that kills most people, usually while they sleep.
~2–3 minto get out of a modern house fire
~50%lower risk of dying with working smoke alarms
Smokekills more people than burns do
The whole strategy fits in six words: get out, stay out, call 112.
Not "put it out". Not "grab the laptop". Not "check the other room first". Out, then call — and never go back inside for anything or anyone; tell the crew who is missing and where they sleep.
Why the numbers moved
Fire researchers have run this experiment repeatedly: furnish one room the way houses were furnished decades ago, furnish another the way they are now, and light both. The old room takes roughly twenty to thirty minutes to reach flashover — the moment everything in the room ignites at once and survival becomes impossible. The modern room gets there in three to five.
1970s room
~20–30 minutes to flashover
Today's room
~3–5 min
Two consequences follow, and both are counterintuitive. First, the plan has to be automatic, because there is no time to think, find shoes, or work out where the keys are. Second, you cannot rely on waking up naturally. Smoke does not smell like a bonfire and it does not rouse you — carbon monoxide deepens sleep. A working alarm is not a nice extra; it is the only thing between a sleeping household and a smoke-filled hallway.
And the smoke is the danger. Burning synthetics release carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, which incapacitate within a few breaths, and the smoke layer is opaque and pitch black — people who know their own home perfectly become lost in a hallway they have walked ten thousand times. Stay low, and if you can, keep a door between you and it.
Alarms: the one measure that outperforms everything else
One on every floor, in the hallway or landing — the escape route is what must be protected, because that is the path you will use in the dark.
Plus one in every room where someone sleeps. A closed bedroom door protects you from smoke, which also means it delays the hallway alarm from waking you. Sleeping behind a closed door without an alarm inside it is the gap that catches people.
Not in the kitchen or the bathroom. Steam and cooking cause false alarms, false alarms get alarms disabled, and a disabled alarm is the most common cause of a fatal fire in a house that had alarms.
Buy sealed ten-year units, or interlinked alarms so that one sounding sets off all of them. In a two-storey house, an alarm you cannot hear through a closed door is not protecting the sleeper.
Test monthly, with the button. Pick a fixed day. An alarm with a dead or removed battery is decoration — and the battery is usually removed on purpose, after a burnt dinner.
Add a carbon monoxide alarm if you have any fuel-burning appliance — gas boiler, wood stove, gas heater. CO is a different threat from fire, and a smoke alarm will not detect it.
The fact nobody expects: many children do not wake to a smoke alarm. Studies of sleeping children repeatedly find them sleeping through alarms loud enough to wake adults. Your plan cannot assume the children get themselves up — it has to say, by name, who wakes whom.
Close the door — the free intervention
This is the single most underused piece of fire safety, and it costs nothing: sleep with bedroom doors closed. In side-by-side tests, a closed door keeps a bedroom survivable while the open-door room next to it becomes lethal — dramatically lower temperature, dramatically lower carbon monoxide, and enough visibility to reach a window.
Closed door, fire outside it
Temperature stays survivable rather than reaching hundreds of degrees
Carbon monoxide stays far lower
The room stays visible enough to find the window
You gain minutes — often the difference
Which is why
Close doors behind you as you leave. Every closed door slows the fire and protects anyone still inside.
Never open a door that is warm. Touch it with the back of your hand, high up. Warm door, or smoke at the edges: leave it shut and use your second way out.
If you cannot get out: close the door, block the gap with bedding or towels — wet if there is water — go to the window, call 112, tell them exactly which room, and make yourself visible.
The plan, written down
A plan that lives in someone's head is not a plan, because the person holding it may be the one asleep upstairs. Fill this in — it saves on this device and prints onto the card at the bottom of the page.
Somewhere specific and away from the building — the lamppost, the neighbour's gate. Everyone goes there and stays there.
The route you would normally take, described as you would walk it in the dark.
Every room needs a second option — a different staircase, a window that opens, a flat roof. Check it actually opens.
By name. Children, anyone elderly, anyone who cannot move quickly or does not hear well.
Always the same place, reachable in the dark. A locked door you cannot open is how people die in the hallway.
E-bike, scooter and tool batteries: never in the hallway or stairwell, never overnight while everyone sleeps.
A fixed monthly date, so it actually happens. Press the button on every alarm.
Then rehearse it once, at night, with the lights off. Walk the route on your hands and knees, because that is how you will actually move under a smoke layer. Households that have walked it once move without deciding; households that have only discussed it stand in the hallway and debate.
When not to fight it
Almost everyone overestimates what a domestic extinguisher can do and underestimates how fast a small fire stops being small. The honest rule: you get one short attempt at something genuinely tiny, with your exit behind you, and only if everyone else is already leaving.
Maybe
A fire still smaller than a wastepaper basket, in the open, and not spreading.
You are between it and your way out — never the other way round.
The room is not filling with smoke.
One attempt. If it does not go out immediately, leave and close the door.
Never
Water on a cooking-oil fire. It flashes into a fireball instantly. Turn off the heat, cover the pan with a lid or a fire blanket, and do not move the pan.
Water on anything electrical while it is live.
An oven or microwave fire with the door open — turn it off and keep the door shut.
A lithium battery fire. No domestic extinguisher stops it; it reignites and produces violently toxic smoke. Get everyone out, close the door, call 112.
Anything already bigger than that, anything between you and the exit, or anything in a room filling with smoke.
And never go back in. Not for a pet, not for documents, not for a phone, and not to look for someone — most people who die re-entering a burning building die for something that was replaceable, and rescuers then have two people to find. Tell the fire crew who is missing and which room they sleep in. They have breathing apparatus, thermal cameras and training; you have a lungful of air and no visibility.
The new fire in the hallway: lithium batteries
Lithium-ion batteries in e-bikes, scooters, hoverboards, power tools and power banks have added a genuinely new hazard to ordinary homes. When one fails it does not simply burn — it goes into thermal runaway: sudden, extremely hot, self-feeding, hard to extinguish, prone to reigniting, and generating a large volume of highly toxic smoke in seconds. And the object is very often parked exactly where it does the most damage: the hallway, the stairwell, next to the front door.
Never charge on or next to an escape route. Not the hallway, not the stairwell, not blocking the only door. Ideally a shed, garage or outbuilding; otherwise a room whose door you can close.
Do not charge unattended overnight. Charge while people are awake, and unplug when it is full.
Use the original charger and battery. Cheap replacements and mismatched chargers are heavily over-represented in these fires; so are batteries repaired by hand.
Retire any battery that is swollen, hissing, leaking, smells sharp, gets very hot, or has been badly dropped. Take it to proper battery disposal, not the bin — and not back on the charger.
If one starts venting or smoking: leave immediately. Do not carry it outside — people are seriously burned doing exactly that. Close the door behind you and call 112 from outside.
The boring list that prevents most of them
Kitchen and heat
Never leave a pan on heat unattended — cooking is the leading cause of house fires.
Keep a lid within reach of the hob; it is a better tool than an extinguisher.
Clean the extractor filter and the grill pan; fat is fuel.
Keep heaters a clear metre from curtains, bedding, laundry and furniture, and never dry clothes on them.
Empty the tumble dryer's lint filter every cycle.
Electrics and flame
Don't chain extension leads or overload a single socket, especially with high-power appliances.
Replace anything with a scorched plug, a hot cable, or a smell of burning plastic.
Candles: never unattended, never near curtains, out before sleep or leaving.
Smoking: outside if possible, and never anywhere someone might fall asleep. Cigarettes and sofas are a lethal combination.
Close internal doors at night, including the kitchen and the living room.
And once a year, walk your own home asking one question: if this room were full of black smoke at three in the morning, how would the person sleeping in it get out? Anything you cannot answer is a job for this weekend.
Carbon monoxide: the one your nose can't find
Carbon monoxide has no colour, no smell and no taste, and it comes from ordinary appliances working badly rather than from fire — a boiler that isn't serviced, a gas heater in a room without ventilation, a wood stove with a blocked flue, an extractor fan pulling fumes back down a chimney. It binds to your blood in place of oxygen, and its early symptoms are indistinguishable from flu or a hangover: headache, nausea, dizziness, tiredness, confusion.
The tell that gives it away: everyone in the household feels ill at the same time — pets included — and everyone gets better after time outside, then worse again at home. Flu doesn't work like that. If that pattern fits, say the words "I think it might be carbon monoxide" to a doctor or on the phone to emergency services, because it changes what they test for.
Do
Fit a certified CO alarm in any room with a fuel-burning appliance, and one where people sleep if a boiler or stove is nearby. It is a separate device from a smoke alarm.
Have boilers, stoves and flues serviced on schedule — the whole point is catching the fault before it produces gas.
Watch for soot or yellow-brown staining around an appliance, a lazy yellow flame where it should be crisp and blue, or pilot lights that keep going out.
If the alarm sounds or you suspect it
Get everyone outside into fresh air immediately, then call the emergency number from outside.
Open doors and windows on your way out if you can do it without delay — but leaving comes first.
Turn the appliance off if it's on your way; do not go looking for it.
Don't go back in to search, ventilate or fetch things, and don't sleep there until it has been checked.
Never run a generator, barbecue or petrol engine indoors, in a garage, or by an open window — that is the fastest way to fill a home with it.
Apartment blocks: where "get out" has an exception
In a block of flats, "everybody out" can be the more dangerous instruction. Flats are built to contain a fire for a period, and a corridor or stairwell full of smoke can be far deadlier than a protected flat. Which strategy applies to your building is worth knowing before it matters — many buildings post it in the entrance hall.
Fire in your own flat: get everyone out, close the door behind you — that closed door is what protects your neighbours — and call from outside. Don't stop for anything.
Fire elsewhere in the building, and your escape route is smoky: in many blocks the advice is to stay in your flat, keep the door closed, block gaps, call the emergency number, give your flat number, and go to a window where you can be seen. Leave if the fire service tells you to, or if your own flat becomes unsafe.
Never use the lift in a fire. It can stop at the fire floor and open its doors.
Your flat's front door is a fire door. Never wedge it open, and don't damage or remove the self-closer — it's what buys the whole staircase time.
Keep corridors and stairwells clear. Bikes, prams, boxes and — worst of all — charging batteries in a shared corridor are both fuel and obstruction on the one route everyone needs in the dark.
If someone can't get out quickly
Anyone elderly, disabled, or with reduced mobility, hearing or sight needs their own plan rather than the household's plan. Sleeping on the ground floor where possible, keys and a phone within reach of the bed, a route that needs no stairs, and alarms designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing people — vibrating pads and strobes. Many fire services will visit, assess a home and agree a personal escape plan free of charge; asking for that visit is one of the highest-value phone calls in this whole page.
The drill: 16 decisions in the dark
Sixteen moments — a beeping alarm at 3am, a pan alight, a warm door handle. Some are about leaving faster than feels reasonable; some are about not doing the instinctive thing. Pick your move; every answer explains why.
Your escape plan
Print it and put it on the fridge or inside a cupboard door. Anything you filled in above appears here.
OUR FIRE ESCAPE PLAN
Meeting point outside
Main way out
Second way out
Who wakes and helps whom
Keys live
Batteries charge
Alarm test day
IF THE ALARM SOUNDS
Wake everyone — shout, don't search
Stay low under the smoke
Feel doors with the back of your hand; warm door → second way out
Close doors behind you
Out to the meeting point, then call 112
Never go back in. Tell the crew who is missing and where they sleep
NEVER
Water on an oil-pan fire or on live electrics · Carrying a burning battery outside · Opening a warm door · Going back for anything
Test every alarm monthly · Sleep with doors closed · Walk the route once in the dark