Editorial: Mother sounds timely alarm

Natasha Timmins and her daughter Shaydine

The problem with often-repeated safety messages is that they can lose their power over time.

Hopefully the message gets through and people subconsciously follow instructions, be it wearing a seatbelt, obeying the speed limit or installing smoke alarms.

The fire service is often at pains to stress the importance of working smoke alarms in alerting home owners to danger. We all know that these devices can be the difference between life and death.

Surprisingly, though, we still hear about houses that don't have them.

Natasha Timmins emerged last week as a powerful advocate for smoke alarms.

She spoke out in the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of the deaths of her two sons in a house fire.

Her harrowing story was a reminder of just how much is at stake.

Ten years on and there is not a day she does not think of the moment when her two boys, Kahvan and Cayden, were taken from her in the fire that engulfed their Otumoetai home.

Kahvan Beatty, 4, and his brother Cayden, 2, perished in the early morning blaze, which a forensic examination found began when a heat source was placed on a couch. Miss Timmins and her daughter Shaydine, 6, escaped the fire, which engulfed the front of her weatherboard house in minutes and prevented anyone reaching the boys.

There was a smoke alarm in the house but it had been taken down because the battery was flat. A new battery had been bought but had not yet been put into the device because it had been misplaced, she said.

Miss Timmins said she has never been able to move on from her grief of losing the two boys. She wants other families to avoid the same fate by making sure they have working smoke alarms.

I can only imagine the trauma of such an event and admire her selflessness in sharing her story with the hope of informing other families so they do not have to go through the same experience.