Hanford Insider

Fire safety, fall events, and a comeback win: a Hanford Insider tour of what matters now

• Rob Bentley • Season 3 • Episode 11

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The week bursts with energy—city moves that affect our day-to-day, a stacked fall calendar, a symphony season opener, and a high school football finish that had us on our feet. We also bring a crucial safety story to the front: Fire Chief Daniel Perkins joins us to unpack why residential fire deaths have climbed even as fires have declined, who’s most at risk, and the simple habits that tip the odds. From a free smoke alarm installation day to the lifesaving logic behind “close before you doze,” this conversation turns data into action you can take today.

We start on the civic beat with City Council updates on interchanges, public art, and temporary signage, then walk through October highlights: Thursday Night Marketplace with live music, The History of Kings County Agriculture exhibit at the Carnegie Museum, Witches Night Out, artisan markets, a rib cook-off in Civic Park, Walk with a Doc, and a cozy movie night at the Fox Theater. Conductor Dr. David Green previews the King’s Symphony Orchestra’s new season—think Also Sprach Zarathustra’s sunrise paired with Florence Price’s Adoration—plus upcoming choir collaborations and a young artist competition that spotlights local talent.

Safety takes center stage as we break down the Sound the Alarm campaign, where the Hanford Fire Department, Hanford CERT, American Red Cross, and Breakfast Lions Club team up to install 250 free smoke alarms in owner-occupied homes, with additional support for renters. You’ll hear clear steps to get on the list, why older adults and multigenerational households face higher risk, and practical drills to run this week: test alarms, plan two exits per room, and always close your bedroom door at night to slow smoke and heat. We wrap with the sports desk: Hanford High’s comeback over Tulare Union, Sierra Pacific’s gritty five-set volleyball win, and water polo results that keep league races tight.

Want the full calendar in your inbox and first dibs on local highlights? Subscribe at HanfordInsider.com, share this episode with a neighbor who needs a smoke alarm, and leave us a quick review so more Hanford folks can find the show.

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SPEAKER_02:

On this episode of The Hanford Insider, Hanford Fire Chief Daniel Perkins stops by to recap Sunday's open house and let us know about how you can get a free smoke detector installed at your home this Saturday, October eighteenth. Rob will give you a rundown of the busy October calendar, then later I'll be back with your sports report. This is the Hanford Insider for Monday, october thirteenth.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Rob Bentley. Each episode, we highlight the stories, events, and people that make Hanford such a unique place to call home. From local history and culture to what's happened around town today, we're here to keep you connected and in the know. This weekend certainly was a busy one in Hanford. I hope you had a chance to get out and enjoy the cooler weather. Now let's jump into some community news. The Hanford City Council met last Tuesday. They received an update from Caltrans on the proposed interchange at 198th and 9th Avenue. The project includes 1.4 miles of upgrades between Highway 43 and 10th Avenue. Caltrans announced that there will be an open house for citizens to give their input and see preliminary plans on Tuesday, October 14th at the Hanford City offices at 5 30 PM. On next week's show, I'll have Alex Aguilera on the show to talk about that project as well as the Highway 41 Elkhorn Expressway. Also at the Hanford City Council meeting, there was a very long discussion regarding setbacks for the gazebas, patio covers, sheds, and other backyard structures. City staff received feedback from the council members and community members and will come back soon for a final draft ordinance. During the regular meeting, there were three public hearings. The first one was updating the new mural ordinance, then they finally updated the graffiti removal ordinance. And to end the public hearings, they held another discussion regarding temporary signs such as feather flags. They approved a new ordinance, and I'm not even going to pretend to understand it, so I'll just defer to city staff on the new regulations. If you have a business that puts up temporary signage, be sure to check with them so that you're in compliance. The final item of council member compensation was tabled until the next meeting, which will be held on October 21st. Now let's take a look at this week's community calendar. At the Thursday Night Marketplace this week, it's crew appreciation night with music by Eminent Groove. The Carnegie Museum of Kings County's History of Agriculture in Kings County Part 2 is open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. through December 14th. They'll be holding their third annual Gala fundraiser next Saturday, October 25th. You can get your tickets at the museum during regular hours or online at Carnegymuseum of Kingscounty.org. Friday, October 17th is annual Main Street Hanford Witches Night out in downtown Hanford. The event is sold out, but you're still welcome to attend the after party in the Civic Park. Saturday, October 18th is one of the busiest days on our calendar, so let's get a rundown. Walk with the Doc will be held at Freedom Park at 9 a.m. The Sierra Pacific Band is having their shredding event across from Carls Jr. from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The Walk for Life will be held at the Calvary Chapel Church at 9 a.m. The Kings County Art League Artisan Market will be held at the Fast Plaza from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The 8th Street Fall Vendure Fair will be held next to the Carnegie Museum from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. In the Civic Park, it's the Griswold LaSalle Community Cook-Off Ultimate Rib Challenge from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. And to end Saturday's events, the Practical Magic movie will be shown at the Hanford Fox Theater at 7 p.m. There will also be some special events on Sunday, October 19th. The annual Kings River Hardwick School Calico Arts Festival is happening. And the final event of the weekend is the King's Symphony Orchestra Fall Concert at the Hanford Fox Theater. I had a chance to catch up with our conductor, Dr. David Green.

SPEAKER_03:

It's a really exciting concert, Rob. We are um starting off our 52nd season of the King's Symphony Orchestra and the third season. And we're just gonna have um a great concert. So starting off with the also strong stars of Ancer, which you might know from the 2001 Space Odyssey, which is gonna be fantastic. Moving into the Hungarian Arch by earlier, um a wonderful transcription of a piece called Adoration by Florence Price, which is originally for Oregon, but we are featuring our strings. We'll be then going into the first double dialing here featuring our content naturally and local string pedagogy and features. And we'll be closing out the concert with the first entity, which it's just a really underrated infantry that doesn't get a lot of performance events.

SPEAKER_01:

The concert's on the 19th at the Hanford Fox Theater. How can we get tickets?

SPEAKER_03:

Well you can use the orchestra.org and your tickets, or you can create your tickets at the door. We'd love to have you.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's wonderful, Dave. Uh I hope you have a great concert and I look forward to hearing it.

SPEAKER_03:

Um definitely checking out tickets or future concerts. Um we've got really exciting having coming out here, including a Christian concert, which will feature choir students from the Hanford Area High School, a young artist competition that we've done for years, which includes a high school or college solo list. And we're actually expanding that this year to include vocal solo list in addition to an instrumental solo list, and then of course our very popular pop.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks a lot, David. I've put together a great list of pumpkin patches, fall festivals, trunk retreats, and all of your favorite fall events, and you can find it on the My Community Calendar. Don't forget that subscribers to the show get an updated community calendar in their inbox twice a week. My calendar, without a doubt, is the most comprehensive community calendar available. There's no other calendar that can even come close. Become a subscriber today at HanfordInsider.com. If you have an event coming up and you'd like some help getting the word out, let's work together. Send your information to HanfordInsider at gmail.com. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly newsletter to get a complete calendar of events. It's the most comprehensive community calendar available. Well, it's great to be here with Chief Daniel Perkins of the Hanford Fire Department, and we are celebrating Fire Prevention Week. And uh, how are you doing, Daniel? It's good to see you again. It's good to see you too, sir.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm doing quite well. Yeah, as uh as you mentioned, this is the wrap-up of Fire Prevention Week, and we celebrate it every single year. And not so much celebrate, but memory really commemorate it uh with the advent of the Great Chicago fire. And one of the things for us to remember about how conflagrations or very large-scale fire, as we experienced in California uh this early year in January, when we had a conflagration that uh basically wiped out entire sections of a major metropolitan city that's been unheard of in modern times.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the Palisades fire in Southern California. Now they're talking about the uh impacts of the rain that we're going to be having this week. So before we get to our big uh news about the smoke detector event, uh let's recap a little bit of uh yesterday's open house.

SPEAKER_00:

We had a fantastic event there at Open House. We had almost 600 uh folks visit us from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. We had a lot of great uh outside help. We had a number of great vendors. We had the Rotary Club, we had the Lions Club, we had American Ambulance of Kings County, we had Alicia Ann Arush Vern Foundation, we had Lowe's, uh Corporate Lowe's come in and also assist us with some of our other items, including our community emergency response team, which you're also a member, and I really appreciate that. Uh, so our cert team was there helping out with that, and we had people come in and learn about stop, drop, and roll, as well as clothes before you does. And we'll talk about closed before you does kind of at the end of this little program today.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it was so great to see all the smiling faces on the kids knocking down the the uh uh prop with the water and stuff. They were having such a good time. But we have a big event to talk about, and that is the smoke detector giveaway, if you will, um event coming up on Saturday. And I know that the cert teams involved with that and the Breakfast Lions Club. Can you tell us a little bit about the event and why it's so important to have a working smoke detector in your house?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. This event that we're talking about is called the Sound the Alarm Campaign. And we have worked uh tirelessly over probably the last six to seven months with the American Red Cross and the Breakfast Lions Club of Hanford. Breakfast Lions Club graciously donated$1,000, which we purchased about 80 to 90 smoke detectors. We use those specific smoke detectors on our fire apparatus. We take them out to different scenes. So if we get to a medical aid or if we've had someone that's experienced a fire and they need a replacement smoke detector, we immediately replace that smoke detector free of charge with the Breakfast Lions Club. Doesn't matter whether person rents or they own their own home, we can replace it immediately. In comparison, the American Red Cross campaign, we do have to have people that own their home, not renting. And then we are able to install the smoke detectors ourselves on that scene. So that's what we're going to concentrate on today and talking about is really not only the program, but the why behind the program. And many people don't understand how severe the fire problem is in the United States today. Um typically we have just under about 400,000 fires uh that are residential fires in a year. And really, overall, in the United States, there are 1.4 million fires that happen in a calendar year on average. About 25% of those or 340,000 of them are residential fires. And this is where the statistics really tell a an alarming trend with us. And although we've had fewer fires in residences, a 6% decrease uh according to the National Fire Protection Association, even with that 6% decrease, we've seen a disproportionate increase in deaths in residential fires. We've seen a 17% increase over the last 10 years on average of deaths in residential fires. So what does that tell us? That really tells us we have a significant fire problem in residences in the United States. So what are we doing about it? One of those things is we're trying to make sure that the people that it affects the most are most prepared for that. And what do I mean by most prepared? Well, having a working smoke detector in your home really increases of your chances of survival in a fire by well over 50%. So if you have a working smoke detector, it will alert you, wake you up in the middle of the night because most fire deaths in residences occur between the hours of 12 p.m. and 6 a.m. So we have that window at time of that six-hour period where almost all of those fires that causes cause deaths in residences occur. So that means people are succumbed, overcome by the smoke, succumb to their illnesses and injuries from that smoke, and then the fire then overruns the rest of the house, and then we discover people after the fact. So what it is what else is there for us to learn from this information? Some of the really key elements are the group of people who are at most at risk. If I said that there were 2,920 residential fire deaths, 68% of those or 1,955 deaths occur in persons age 65 or older. That's a very shocking statistic when we look at overall, you know, what what things should we be concentrating on. So residential homes where we have 65 people that are 65 or older in the home, they have a much higher likelihood of dying in a fire, as well as the very young. So very young, very old, that's what we're concentrating on. And also in families where they're multi-generational families living in the same home. If you live in a home with your parents, grandparents, or maybe you're there and you have your children, aunts, uncles, cousins all living in the same home, that's where we see the real increase in clusters of fire deaths. So if you have that particular type of situation and you're live and you're living in that, we want to make sure that you reach out to the Hanford Fire Department. We have a smoke alarm program that you can sign up for. If you own your home, we can come out and install a smoke detector free of charge. And that's what we're doing on October 18th. We're trying to get out early in the morning at 8 a.m. all the way through about 5 p.m. Our goal is to take the 250 smoke detectors that were graciously donated to the Hanford Fire Department for the American Red Cross and through their sound the alarm campaign and install those 250 smoke detectors. Our other aim is if you even do rent or you have another situation that doesn't meet all those qualifiers, we do have the ability to utilize the Breakfast Lions Club smoke detectors to also install a smoke detector. So really our aim is to get those smoke detectors out in the hands of the people where we're really going to make a difference.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, Saturday is going to be a really cool event. And they can get a hold of the fire department through the City of Hanford website. And is there a phone number that they can call? Or I know in non-emergency, you're not going to call 911, but uh how can they get on the list for a smoke detector?

SPEAKER_00:

So one of the things you can do is you can call 559-585-2145. That's my office phone number, and we'll go to a a queue that will allow you to leave a message for smoke detectors. Or I'll leave an answer and take your name down and make sure that we come to your home on that date and at that time and make sure we install those smoke detectors. One of the other things, too, is we're also trying to get information out about our close before you doze program. And that's really where I'd like to kind of end our conversation on, is telling people about that particular program because coupled with a working smoke detector, if you simply just closed the door to your bedroom before you went to sleep or close before you doze, you increase your chances of survival by well over 65% or 66%. It's an incredible statistic and it's amazing how much fire and smoke that one closed door will peep from entering in there. It also forces you to think about two ways out of every room inside of your home. The one being the door, and we're asking you to close that. If you woke up in the middle of the night to the smoke detector beeping, you feel that doorknob, see if it's hot. If the doorknob is hot, you know, not to open it. Then you come back out, look for the window that you can easily escape from. And that's what we're asking too, is that we practice two ways out of every room inside of your house. One of the more difficult ones, a bathroom. I don't think most people are gonna jump up five and a half to six feet through that tiny little window to jump out. But that's one of the one of the uh the give me's. We don't need you to get out of the bathroom because you're typically not there when a ha when a house fire starts. So we do really encourage people to practice those two ways out of every room, the close before you doze, and making sure, especially as we're coming up on that that time of year when we're going to fall back with our time, when you change the change the clock, we want you to change the batteries in your smoke detector. So that's another old adage, but we're trying to bring all of these things to bear to make sure that everyone is safe as we go through this next weather change, because when typically we have this cooler weather come on, we have a sudden in uh uptick in the number of fires that we have. And we don't want anybody to have a tragedy in their home.

SPEAKER_01:

So going back to smoke detectors for just a minute, I understand you've had some fires recently where smoke detectors could have saved uh family pets.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. So in the last 12 days now, 12 calendar days, we've had two fires in mobile homes. Um, and unfortunately, they've been tragic results. Um both of those mobile homes were completely gutted, unable to be lived in. And the real tragic piece within this is that neither home had working smoke detectors in them. They had smoke detectors, none of them had working batteries in them, or if they were, they were off and on a table somewhere else. The real tragedy is that there were two cherished family members and pets that perished in those fires. We didn't want anybody to experience any loss in this change of season. And just to let you know, these fires do occur in Hanford. You may not see them on the news, they may not be up in your face, but we do experience these large losses and these real tragic events. We have about 300 working fires in Hanford every single year. So that's about one a day for the most part. So when you think, well, we don't see them that often, it happens here all the time. We just don't, they don't arise the the big headline news stories that you typically see.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, thanks to that information. I know the close the closed before you doze uh campaign has been uh very educational. I know that's you know there's a marketplace. And with the uh national night out that we had, Hanford's Night Out last Tuesday, you had the information out about the smoke smoke detector event, and then of course at yesterday's open house. So this is all really great information, Chief. And I'd like to thank you for sharing some time with us on your busy schedule. I know everybody's working really hard for all these events, plus responding to calls, so it means a lot to the community when you take time out to come on the show. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you, sir.

SPEAKER_00:

Have a safe holidays. And now it's time for Hanford Insider Sports with Eric Bentley.

SPEAKER_02:

We'll start with an exciting football matchup as Hanford High took the trip over to Tulare Union to take on the tribe in an epic back-and-forth clash. The Bullpups set the tone early with an 80-yard Tavion Patterson flea flicker to take a 6-0 lead, and Andrew Ortega would add a field goal to push that lead to 9-0 before the first tribe points came defensively with a pick six to make it 9-7. Hanford High wasted no time responding as Jaron Mao found Tavion Patterson to put the Bullpups up 15-7 at the end of the first. Then the Tulare Union offense woke up, scoring four of the game's next five touchdowns to take a 32-22 lead into quarter number four. Hanford High's first score in the second half came with eight minutes left in the game, as Jaron Mao was on the receiving end of a touchdown pass to make it a one-score game, 32-28. The Bullpup defense then forced a tribe turnover on downs, allowing the offense to connect for what would be the game-winning touchdown pass from Tavion Patterson again for the 35-32 lead. Amid a flurry of Tulary Union penalties, the Bullpups were able to maintain their composure and escape with the victory. The win vaults the Bullpups to the top of the WIL as the only team with an undefeated league record at 2-0. Another tough league showdown this Friday at Neighbor Bowl as they'll play host to 5-2 Tilary Western. Sierra Pacific football took on league-leading Emmanuel last week, and it was all Eagles, 56-6 the final score. The Golden Bears will try to right their offensive struggles this week as they travel to Selma looking for their first league win. And Hanford West football was shut out again, this time by Selma, as the Huskies remain winless on the year. A Thursday home game awaits this week as Exeter comes to town at 7.15. Over to volleyball now, where we had a thrilling crosstown Tri-County Sequoia League showdown between Hanford West and Sierra Pacific. The Golden Bears took set 1 28-26 and set 2-25-21, putting the Huskies' undefeated league record at risk. However, the Huskies responded in a big way, taking set 3 26-24 and set four 25-20 to carry momentum on their side into the decisive fifth set. But it was the Golden Bears who used home court to their advantage, upsetting Hanford West 16-14 in the fifth set to take the match. Sierra Pacific improves to 2-2 in league play while Hanford West falls to 3-1 in league action. And Hanford High Volleyball split their two league matchups last week as they were swept by Lamore, then swept Dainuba. The Bullpups find themselves at 4-2 in league action. Out to the pool now for notable water polo results on the boys' side. Hanford West picked up a pair of wins over Granite Hills and Kerman to even their league record at 2-2. Hanford High suffered their first league loss to Tular Western last Tuesday before taking down Michigan on Thursday to improve to 3-1 in league. And Sierra Pacific also went 1-1 last week, falling to Reedley, but edging out Strathmore in a close one as the Golden Bears find themselves 3-1 in league play. In Girls Water Polo, Hanford West picked up a pair of league wins, shutting out Granite Hills 18-0 before taking down Kerman 9-7. And Sierra Pacific fell to Reedley last week but took down Strathmore to improve to 3-1 in league play. As always, we like to cover as many sports as we can, but we can only do so much without you. Any sport, any team, any level, if you have a score report or a team update, please let us know at HanfordInsider at gmail.com. I'm Eric Bentley, and this has been your Hanford Insider Sports Report.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's all the time we have for this week's show. If you enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to show your support, you can go to buymeacoffee.com slash Hanford Insider to make a donation. If you'd like to join the Hanford Insider email list, stop by my website at HanfordInsider.com to sign up for updates. You'll also get an exclusive copy of my newsletter in your inbox each week. I also need your help getting the word out about the show by liking and sharing on social media, or like most people, just tell a friend. For more information about the show, you can find this podcast on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, and YouTube at Hanford Insider. If you have a show idea, be sure to email me at HanfordInsider at gmail.com and I'll look into it. Thanks for listening. Have a wonderful week.

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Rob Bentley

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