In Wilton Thursday, students from the Cushing School crawled through the Chesterville Fire Department’s smoke trailer, one of many Fire Prevention Week events held across Maine in recent days. Greeting them when they emerged was the friendly, huggable mascot Sparky the fire dog.

Firefighters also talked to students about what they should do if they ever have to escape from fire, and — appropriately so — the children took the lesson seriously.

Fire is deadly serious, as we saw in Bethel this week when 39-year-old Joshua Piawlock died in an early-morning fire at his home. The fire started in wiring in the walls while Piawlock, his girlfriend and their son slept.

Lucinda Bilodeau and Eric Piawlock escaped, but Piawlock died in his bedroom from smoke inhalation.

Investigators said they found no indication there were any working smoke detectors in the house.

Would a smoke detector have saved Piawlock? No one will ever know, but according to the National Fire Protection Association the chance of dying from smoke or fire doubles when there is no working smoke detector in the home.

Doubles.

In Maine, since 2000, there has been an average of 17 fire deaths per year. In 2005 and again in 2011, the deaths climbed unusually high, to 23 people. The lowest number of deaths in recent years was in 2010, when nine people died. Last year, 19 people died.

Most of those people died at home.

The cumulative total since 2000 is 236, which is too many. However, according to the U.S. Fire Administration, Maine has such a low risk of death due to fire that it doesn’t even calculate the numeric risk, like it does for most states.

And, according to the Maine Department of Public Safety, the average number of deaths here has dropped dramatically in the past half-century. While we average 17 deaths per year now, we averaged 20 deaths per year through the 1990s, 32 deaths per year in the 1980s and 49 deaths per year from the ’70s back through the early 1950s.

That’s a dramatic and welcome trend, with less than half the average number of deaths now than 50 years ago.

The reason for the decline is more use of smoke detectors and better public fire prevention programs, such as the ones offered by Maine’s professional and volunteer fire departments, better code enforcement and more thorough building inspections in our cities.

As safety and awareness improve, the downward trend of fire deaths is being seen across the country.

According to the U.S. Fire Administration, 4,013 Americans died in fires in 2001. In 2010, 3,445 people died. That’s still too many people, but it’s 568 fewer people dying that year than in a single year a decade before.

The major cause of fires leading to a person’s death?

Smoking.

In Maine, nearly 20 percent of all fire fatalities are linked to cigarettes, and many of those deaths were caused by someone using oxygen while smoking. This is cause for concern, according to state officials, particularly because of Maine’s aging population.

As it stands, 32 to 40 percent of all fire deaths are of older adults, people who can’t move as quickly as younger adults. The older population, many of whom use oxygen at home, is a group of at-risk Mainers the Fire Marshal’s Office intends to study more closely.

Interestingly, the property damage due to fire has actually increased in the past decade. The rise is mainly because fire departments are now better at reporting losses, according to the most recent State of Maine Report of the State Fire Marshal, not necessarily because more property is being lost to fire. In 2011, the total dollar loss was close to $35 million in Maine.

We’ll likely see a spike in property loss to fire this year because of the streak of apartment building arson fires in Lewiston last April and May. At the time, the city calculated the loss at $2 million, but that was an estimate and did not include the loss of misplaced families’ personal possessions.

For nearly 200 people living in the downtown, the horror of fire became very real when their apartment buildings burned, particularly for the people who were sleeping soundly when some of the fires started.

It was, as many public and fire officials said, amazing that no one was killed.

The trend toward fewer fire fatalities is the result of a lot of hard work by a lot of dedicated people over a long period of time. It’s the result of better training, stronger public policy and improved technology of smoke detectors. While marvelous to think we might eliminate all fire deaths, the fact is we have — as a society — greatly diminished the human destruction caused by fire, which is a tremendous accomplishment.

And the work continues.

During the past week, fire departments across Maine scheduled fire drills in schools, taught children how to help their families draft an escape plan from their homes, and worked through fire safety lists for children to share with their parents.

They handed out free smoke detectors and hauled smoke trailers around for public demonstrations.

And, tragically, in Bethel they carried a lifeless Joshua Piawlock out of his bedroom.

He was the 17th person to die in a fire in Maine this year.

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The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and the editorial board.