Logan fire network takes on CSIRO over smoke alarm test data

A COMMUNITY safety group, set up after Australia’s deadliest house fire, is taking on a David and Goliath battle in a bid to raise the alarm about smoke detectors.

Logan House Fire Support Network fire safety campaign founders Louie and Christine Naumovski with a new photoelectric smoke detector. Picture: Renae Droop

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A LOGAN community organisation is challenging the government’s top scientific agency, the CSIRO, for endorsing a range of smoke alarms, it deems dangerous.

Logan House Fire Support Network, founded by Crestmead husband-and-wife team Louie and Christine Naumovski, accused the CSIRO of endorsing unsafe smoke alarms.

The couple, along with the World Fire Safety Foundation, also demanded the agency release the data on which it based its decision.

Mr Naumovski played a crucial role in 2016 in getting Queensland to make it mandatory for photoelectric smoke alarms in all houses.

He took up that campaign after 11 people perished in a 2011 Slacks Creek fire, the greatest loss of life in a house fire in Australian history.

The grieving family at the Slacks Creek address where 11 people died in a house fire in 2011.

Now Mr Naumovski is in another “David and Goliath” battle in the administrative appeals tribunal taking on the federal government for the release of CSIRO smoke alarm test data, from 1993 onwards.

He claimed the data would show most smoke alarms in homes don’t activate in time to save lives.

In 2016, his Freedom of Information request to CSIRO was for the agency to release data showing at “what levels of smoke do the ionisation smoke alarms activate when tested”.

But CSIRO refused to release the tests, commissioned by manufacturers, saying it was protected by commercial confidentiality.

“Our stance is, and always will be, public safety first and the public has a right to know if the product on their ceilings won’t alert them in time to get out of a fire,” Mr Naumovski said.

“Our argument was there was no commercial confidence as the CSIRO is the only agency that tests smoke alarms for Australian Standards under AS3786-1993.

“What we do know is that the ionisation smoke alarms activate between 40-60 per cent smoke obscuration … which is up to three times later than the safe limit and puts people’s lives at risk. If the public was told the dangers of their existing alarms they would switch to photoelectric as soon as possible.”

Photoelectric alarms are compulsory in hospitals and hotels but Mr Naumovski said the ionisation alarms, which respond to flames but not smouldering, were common in homes — especially in Logan. The tribunal was due to make a decision on whether to release the data on Monday, July 9 but that date was put back to the end of the month.

Mr Naumovski said since January there had been 62 structural fire call outs in Logan, 235 in southeast Queensland and 887 across the state.

Tributes to those who died in a house fire in Slacks Creek in 2011.