In a community-focused effort to improve fire safety and education, teams of volunteers recently joined forces with the Upper Arlington Fire Division for a smoke detector installation canvassing event called ‘Sound the Alarm.’ The initiative in partnership with the American Red Cross targeted homes on Shrewsbury Road, Nottingham Road, and Cranford Road on Saturday, April 13, 2024.

The outreach effort aimed to enhance home safety by ensuring residents had functional smoke detectors. If detectors were too old, needed new batteries, or if there were too few detectors in a home, volunteers installed new ones free of charge.

• 48 homes were made safer
• 95 people were served in total
• 171 smoke alarms were installed

This success wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of 47 volunteers from various organizations, including the American Red Cross Central & Southern Ohio Region, Box 15, Car Max, Columbia Gas, and Women in Philanthropy.

This is the second partnership between the American Red Cross and Upper Arlington Fire Division, with plans to establish a regular schedule for reaching out to different neighborhoods in the months ahead.