Census Webinar to Showcase New Orleans Smoke Alarm Campaign
The Oct. 13 webinar will explain how communities can launch similar projects using free tools and public data. It's taking place during this year's Fire Prevention Week (Oct. 9-15).
A webinar taking place Oct. 13 could be highly useful to community leaders seeking to help their residents be safer against fires, even as the 2016-2017 winter fire season draws near. The U.S. Census Bureau is presenting the webinar to show how the New Orleans Fire Department and the New Orleans Office of Performance and Accountability used block group-level data from the bureau's American Community Survey to identify homes that were most in need of smoke alarms. They have distributed more than 10,000 smoke alarms to New Orleans residents since March 2015 based on those data.
The webinar will explain how communities can launch similar projects using free tools and public data, and it's taking place during this year's Fire Prevention Week (Oct. 9-15). The week's campaign is "Don't Wait – Check the Date! Replace Smoke Alarms Every 10 Years," and it is the final year of NFPA's three-year effort to educate the public about basic but essential elements of smoke alarm safety.
The webinar will begin at 2 p.m. EDT and will show how to use tools and public data, such as Smoke Signals and the American Community Survey. Enigma's Smoke Signals is an open-source tool that helps local communities determine which city blocks are at the highest risk of not having a smoke alarm.
It will include:
- The background between the City of New Orleans and Enigma collaboration
- An overview of the American Community Survey
- An overview and demonstration of Enigma's Smoke Signals
- How free tools and free data can help community leaders find solutions at the local level
The presenters include Gretchen Gooding of the American Community Survey Office; Oliver Wise and Chief Tim McConnell of the City of New Orleans; and Mike Flowers and Jeremy Krinsley of Enigma.