Home Safety Tips from Hock Hochheim
House tip 1: Remove elements of “flash” about your residence that would cause criminals
to single you out as a wealthy target.
House Tip 2: Install and use burglar alarms and use visible large “alarm alert” stickers.
House Tip 3: Secure your windows and doors? Do you keep your front, back and side doors and garage doors closed and locked? Can your interior doors be locked and secure from kicking attack? You can buy emergency time by be able to lock a solid door inside your house. Many safety conscious people will install a serious bedroom door with a solid lock in their homes for this reason. Nearly a third of all burglars enter through an open window or unlocked door.
House Tip 4: Install exterior lights where needed in dark and blind spots.
House Tip 5: Some experts suggest installing storm windows and doors. There is an
interesting body of “glass psychology” studies through time, about how another pane of
window or door-window glass may be a deterrent to burglary.
House Tip 6: Obtain a dog with grounding in protecting its people and property.
House Tip 7: Some the weakest links in protecting your house or apartment is through the
attic. Criminals enter into the garage attic and crawl though the attic and simply push open
the ceiling attic door and drop the stairs. In newer homes this attic access door is a normal
vertical door. These attic doors should be a secure, solid and alarmed doors.
House Tip 8: Arrange a way, either through a peephole or a surveillance camera, that you
can examine people at your front door before you open it.
House Tip 9: A safe room. Safe rooms are the single most important means for reliably
separating residents from intruders while providing a safe place to await the arrival of
police or on-site security. These rooms can be made safe from criminal invasion and
natural disasters. Do you have a safe room in your house? The entrances may be hidden or
overt. Ensure you have food, water, weapons and communication capabilities. There are
professional firms that will build these room for you, but you can manufacture a solid one
yourself.
House Tip 10: Have weapons you know how to handle, handy.
House Tip 11: Have charged phones AND land-line phones handy. Daniel Dunlap, Okaloosa County, Floirda 911 coordinator reminds us that in a disater emergency the cellphone airwaves may become jammed. But there are more reasons to have land line phones. Dunlap says -
“In some ways, it makes sense to ditch a landline bill and use a cellular telephone service. And it may be awfully tempting to switch to a Voice over Internet Protocol phone service, such as Vonage, when the company advertises lower rates and no need for a long-distance service. However, such choices come at the cost of a potentially longer response time for an emergency call. 911 is sometimes an afterthought. When a call comes through a landline, a 911 dispatch center can see the caller's physical address at the least, Dunlap said. If you're choking and can't speak, (or being attacked) rescuers will still know where to go. A cell phone call, on the other hand, uses global positioning technology to create a map that helps rescuers locate a caller. Triangulation between three towers pinpoints the location, but even then the result may be off by about 300 meters. It might just give me a general location. Sometimes, we get the location of the nearest cell tower instead of the cell phone."
House Tip 12: Make efforts to create the illusion of occupancy? That is creating the
appearance that an occupant is present. One example is always keeping a visible car in your driveway. It is like a burglar alarm to most common criminals. They drive on past your house to find an empty house.
House Tip 13: This tip came from a neighborhood watch coordinator. Next time you come home for the night and you start to put your keys away, think of this. If your car keys fob has a panic alarm system button, then you may also have another alarm for your home. Test it. Hit the panic putton from rooms inside your house or apartment. It will go off from most everywhere inside your house and will keep honking until your battery runs down, it has an auto shut-off, or until you reset it with the button on the key fob chain. It works if you park in your driveway or garage. If your car alarm goes off when someone is trying to break into your house, odds are the burglar rapist may not stick around. After a few seconds all the neighbors will be looking out their windows to see who is out there and sure enough the criminal won't want that. And remember to carry your keys while walking to your car in a parking lot. The alarm can work the same way there. A reader adds, "this would also be useful for any emergency, such as a heart attack, where you can't reach a phone. My Mom has suggested to my Dad that he carry his car keys with him in case he falls outside and she doesn't hear him. He can activate the car alarm and then she'll know there's a problem."
Where do you work? How safe are you at your work place?
