FARMINGTON – Clyde Ross knows kids love firefighters and all the excitement that comes with them. Ross – Farmington’s deputy fire chief – is using that to his advantage, teaching area kids about fire safety in a way he knows they’ll listen to – through experience.

Tuesday, he grinned as he watched a group of first-graders react with wide-eyed awe when a crackling emergency call interrupted a talk he was giving – in the fire station – on fire alarm maintenance.

“It’s good. They have an opportunity to hear the process,” Ross said. “They’ll talk about this for years to come.”

The Mallett School first-graders spent part of the morning at the fire house as part of National Fire Prevention Week.

They learned about fire alarms, fire trucks and the equipment firefighters wear out on the job. They asked questions. “Do you have food at the station?”

“Do you have beds?” (“No, we don’t stay here.”)

“Do you have TV?” (Yes, and it’s huge.)

But it was more than just a fun field trip, Ross said. In emergencies, most thoughts go right out of people’s heads. The more times people hear something, whether in commercials about soaps and medicine or classes about safety, the more it sticks.

Eventually, it becomes your own thought, instead of something somebody told you. You get a headache and think of taking a certain pain pill, he said. Your shirt catches fire, and you stop, drop and roll.

“You need to be able to recall it quickly,” he said.

Later this week, he’ll be running a smoke-house simulation for Mallett students, Mallett School Principal Tracy Douglass said.

“It’s a simulation for kids to come learn about safety in situations where there’s smoke. They emphasize staying calm and thinking clearly,” she said.

“I think that this is the time to really teach kids about those things,” she said. “They’re very impressionable, and you’ll often hear kids talking about what they saw and heard.

“There’s a certain amount of drama and excitement around all that that really gets their attention,” she added.

The benefits of that kind of early training have been borne out in the experiences of firefighters across the country, National Fire Protection Association spokesperson Lorraine Carli said. “Nationwide, fire prevention has worked,” she said, both in decreasing the number of fires and helping kids respond well when they occur.

In one example, Carli described what happened to a five-year-old Maine child who was going to bed when the fire alarm went off. His mother didn’t know where the sound was coming from, Carli said. “The five year-old told her he had gotten an alarm at school (from the local fire department), and that his dad had put it in the basement,” she said. “He told her it was time to use their escape plan.”

Ross recalls similar experiences. “There have been situations where a child, because of his or her training, was able to help and give directions to their family (in an emergency),” he said.