Sheffield schoolchildren star in adorable video with serious message about fire safety
and live on Freeview channel 276
Budding cooks from Mosborough Primary School are the stars of the YouTube movie, created in partnership with South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue, which highlights the perils of leaving your oven unattended.
Oliver and Maisie don their chef’s whites for the comic cooking demonstration, titled Stand By Your Pan, showing how easily preparing a meal can turn to disaster if you get distracted.
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Hide AdThey urge viewers not to take a shower, pop to the shops or fall asleep watching The Chase while cooking, warning them that if they fail to heed the advice ‘there will be lots of smoke, which will be stinky like my dad’.
The fire service, which has attended more than 1,000 cooking related incidents over the last four years, hopes the young stars will get people’s attention and help press home the potentially life-saving safety message.
Area manager Simon Dunker, who is head of the joint police and fire community safety department, said: “We know that cooking is the leading cause of house fire in South Yorkshire. That is a fact and is something we want to change.
“It was responsible for half of all accidental house fires last year. Many of these incidents could have been prevented by taking some really simple steps.
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Hide Ad“We’re not asking a lot, as we know people lead busy lives, but literally standing by your pan can reduce the chance you’re going to have a kitchen fire.
“In turn, that reduces the chances that you, or the kids, are going to get hurt. Or, as a more common outcome, that you are going to have to fork out thousands of pounds for a new
kitchen.”
The key messages from the campaign, which was launched on Friday and will run over Christmas and into the new year, are:
Never leave the room whilst you are cooking food
Keep your oven clean and don’t leave stuff on top, or inside
Test your smoke alarms.
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Hide AdMore than half the cooking fires across South Yorkshire involved food being left in the oven or on the hob for too long and forgotten about, with a smoke-logged kitchen and damaged equipment the most common outcome. Other causes involved items being left on top of the hob, dirty ovens or chip pans.
In September, a house in Walkley was badly damaged by fire after the owner fell asleep on the sofa while cooking some onion rings.
The fire service will be hoping this campaign is as successful as the 2016 video Chip Pan, a parody version of Kings of Leon's Sex On Fire, which raised some £3,000 for charity and briefly threatened to be a contender for Christmas number one, while getting across the dangers of late-night cooking.