WHEN fire crews arrived at her Laverton house earlier this month, Karen refugee Lor Na was waiting patiently by the letterbox with her family.
She had safely carried her six-year-old son, while helping her eldest son, 11, and frail 80-year-old father out of the burning Bladin Street house after hearing a smoke alarm in the middle of the night.
Lor Na, who fled Burma six years ago and speaks limited English, had only recently been at an MFB seminar where she learned about dialling triple-0. The seminar was aimed at breaking down language barriers to achieve fire safety.
“I heard the smoke alarm and ran to my kitchen and I saw the fire on the electric chord on the kettle,” she said through an interpreter.
“I tried to stop the fire, but it was getting bigger so I called triple-0. The whole house was filled up with smoke; my body was full of smoke.
“My youngest son, I had to carry him to the bus stop [outside] and then he woke up from his sleep.”
Once the fire was extinguished, MFB western district multicultural liaison officer Colin Campbell said he received a call from an officer saying: “You won’t believe it. All she could remember was being taught when the smoke alarm goes off, get them all out, stay out the front and stay together.”
Mr Campbell, one of five MFB multicultural officers, conducts fire-safety seminars for newly arrived migrants across Wyndham, Hume, Hobsons Bay, Brimbank and Maribyrnong.
“My catch phrase is changing lives one smoke alarm at a time, by educating them to go home and check alarms, but if something like this electrical fault happens, they can know what to do. A lot of these newly arrived people have grown up in countries where there’s no power and no gas, so a lot of this is about educating them to prevent fires.”
Last week in Laverton, the MFB presented Lor Na with a fire extinguisher and smoke alarms.
