MEXICO – Come spring, Med-Care Ambulance Service will add an interactive public educational tool to its community outreach program – a nearly 3-foot-tall-by-6-foot-wide house that simulates hazards to solve.

The Mexico-based service ordered Sparky’s Injury Prevention/Fire House this week from Modeltech after being awarded a $28,865 federal grant from the 2007 Homeland Security Grant Program, according to Laurieann Milligan, Med-Care’s community outreach coordinator.

Learning by doing, the audience participates in transforming the house from hazardous to safe through use of 3-dimensional parts, flips, tokens and stick-on illustrations. Also, known as the Hazard House, the structure features realistic smoke, fire-lighting effects, and sparks and electricity arcing sounds.

She said the Hazard House would help change people’s behavior and reduce fires and casualties.

Additional packages that come with the program cover the following topics:

• Neighborhood safety – issues such as hazards around a house and motor vehicle safety.

• Recreational safety – issues such as bicycle and playground safety.

• Farm safety – exposes typical hazard situations found on a farm, such as silo fires, tractor safety, electrical safety, grain augers, and more.

• Wildfires – teaches how to create a safety zone around a house, develop an evacuation plan, and more.

• Extreme weather – how to prepare for the disastrous aftermaths of natural catastrophes such as tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and earthquakes.

• Winter risks – Exposes winter hazards and steps to be better prepared by teaching about vehicle safety, power outages and more.

Additional features include bilingual illustrations on home fires and burns, senior citizen home risks, and emergency preparedness.

Milligan said Med-Care signed paperwork this week enabling Modeltech to begin production on the Hazard House, expected to be delivered in April. She said it will be the third of its kind in use in the state and a first for Western Maine.

“We’re going to be looking for any interested parties who can benefit from it. We’ll be more than happy to set something up with it for them. Like, we’d expect fire departments to come and borrow it because it’s about injury prevention, emergency medical services and fire safety,” Milligan said.