 Hi I'm Shirley Bond, the Minister of Justice and the Attorney General for the province of British Columbia and I'm very pleased today to be joined by Chief Lambert here at the Bay Street Fire Hall. And obviously all of us are looking forward to celebrating a wonderful Christmas season with our family and friends. But I've learned from Chief Lambert that there are some things we need to be very careful about when we're decorating our home or getting ready for the holidays. So Chief Lambert maybe you could take some time today and show us a little bit. Some of these things are obviously a significant safety concern. So maybe you could walk us through some of the issues that you're concerned about in terms of fire safety during the holidays. Well certainly Minister. Quite often many Christmas decorations come with electrical sources and in the fire business we tend to look at sources for ignition. I can tell you that predominantly electrical overload is a key component of any source of ignition. For instance we have an example here of a six plug-in to a one. We find that they fail after some time with electrical current passing through them. So we're asking people just to be cognizant of that. Make sure they're not overloading circuits and that they're using approved appliances and devices. So in other words don't plug in all your strings of lights and your your blinking Christmas decorations those kinds of things. Be careful about how you do that. And you can see there's some pretty dramatic effects if you overload those circuits. So okay well that's something we certainly want to avoid. What else should we be careful of chief? Well with some of the Christmas lights for instance when we get them in the box and packaging from the store they come with recommendations on how many strings should be on each circuit. Quite often the lights are kept and the box is thrown away and over years we find that the number of strings put on circuits is in increasing and increasing. And to that end what it does is again it brings electrical current or draw on these circuits that aren't made to handle them. Therefore melting them and again creating an ignition source. Again so what we ask again is people to follow the manufacturer's recommendations and the testing agency's recommendations with regards to what kind of circuit load we put on our holiday ornaments. So you can see this has actually melted the entire cord. So you can imagine if you have that on a Christmas tree or on your mantle that's going to be a major safety issue. What about the carpet chief? I see we've got some major issues here. We look at the use of extension cords again to power many of our appliances and Christmas decorations and what we see is we see carpets extension cords running under carpet. This is an example of heat buildup that melted the carpet as a result of an overloaded electrical circuit. So people are trying to hide the cords. They want their house to look really neat and tidy and instead they end up with a major fire risk. Yes. Wow you know I think what's important to all of us is that we want to be able to enjoy the holiday season. So we need to be thoughtful and careful about those things and one thing that Chief Lambert and I and firefighters across British Columbia have been talking about is making sure that we have working active smoke detectors fire smoke alarms in our homes. So chief I guess we can end our segment by talking about you know if you need a really unique stalking stuffer for someone in your life. We know that smoke alarms are actually inexpensive when you think about the risks that we face and we've looked at the statistics across the province. We know that working smoke alarms actually save lives in British Columbia. So chief I want to thank you for your work both on the smoke alarm campaign for the safety issues that you've brought to our attention. I want to wish you a Merry Christmas. Thank you for the invite here to the Bay Street Fire Hall and we want to encourage you please be fire smart this this holiday season. Enjoy your time together with your family and friends and make sure you're paying attention to some of these important safety tips.