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First Alert® Home Safety Products — Is your home protected? Are you prepared? Take the First Alert® Home Safety Challenge!

First Alert Home Safety Challenge Tour Continued...

This spring, BRK Brands, Inc., maker of First Alert® -branded home-safety products, launched the First Alert® Home Safety Challenge™ Tour, a 33-week mobile public awareness program making over 150 stops throughout the country through November. The tour helps bridge dangerous awareness gaps that Americans have about CO and fire dangers by teaching families how they can make their homes safer.

Housed in a 32-foot truck and trailer, the tour features fun, interactive activities including:

• Great Escape Obstacle Course: Duplicates the challenge of escaping a real home fire.
• Fire Extinguisher Challenge: Demonstrates how to use a fire extinguisher and offers a hands-on skills test.
• Carbon Monoxide Smelling Area: Educates on how difficult it is to detect this odorless, tasteless, invisible gas.
• Virtual Reality Fire Helmet: Allows participants to become "firefighters" by experiencing through a video what it is like to be in a burning room.
• Smoke Rises Fast Simulator: Illustrates the dangers of smoke by showing how quickly smoke engulfs a room.
• Product Placement House: Demonstrates smoke and carbon monoxide alarm placement and maintenance and encourages families to install CO and smoke alarms in their homes and routinely check batteries to make sure units are working properly. On average, a child under age five dies in a residential fire every day,1 and each year CO poisoning kills about 24 children under age 14 and sends more than 1,700 children age 5 and under to the hospital.2 Yet, nearly half of Americans with children have not installed smoke alarms in their children's rooms according to a recent survey, and only one in five families has installed a CO alarm in their children's rooms.

Working with its partners in fire services, retailers and the National SAFE KIDS Campaign®, BRK Brands Inc. hopes the campaign will help reduce deaths and injuries due to fire and accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.

Further information on the tour can be found on the campaign website: www.homesafetychallenge.com.

"We're excited and thrilled to participate in this grass roots effort to meet the ongoing need for home safety education," says James Carey.

Morris Carey explains, "This event is fun and educational for the entire family. Kids can participate in the great escape obstacle course and see what it's like to be in a burning room when they put on the virtual reality fire helmet. It really is an eye opening experience."

1 National SAFE KIDS Campaign Website.
2 National Fire Protection Association.

For more than 25 years, BRK Brands, Inc. has manufactured First Alert®-branded home-safety products including smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, fire extinguishers and escape ladders. Such products are also manufactured and marketed under the BRK Electronics® brand for the builder and contractor audiences. BRK Brands, Inc. products are found in 85 percent of U.S. households and in more than 30 countries worldwide. BRK Brands Inc. is headquartered in Aurora, Ill. For more information, visit www.firstalert.com or www.brkelectronics.com.

The National SAFE KIDS Campaign® is the first and only national nonprofit organization dedicated solely to the prevention of unintentional childhood injury - the number one killer of children ages 14 and under. More than three hundred state and local SAFE KIDS coalitions in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico comprise the Campaign.