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There’s a little chill in the air overnight and in the early mornings, and the first official day of Fall is Saturday.That means Mainers are starting to use their wood stoves and fireplaces.

There are some things you should be aware of to keep your family safe this heating season.”They can and they have caused major fires, so we will put them out, different departments will do different techniques in terms of putting them out, but yes we treat them very seriously,” said Jake Johnson the Education Officer for the Bangor Fire Department.They are chimney fires.For firefighters and those in the home heating business, they know when the peak fire times are.”There’s always a spate of chimney fires you hear about in the news, that you hear about in the early to mid fall when people are lighting the fires for the first time and then it happens again, late or middle of winter, but not so much in the Spring because people stop burning as often, so check again,” said Jim Rockett of Evergreen Home and Hearth of Brewer. “Because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound a cure.”Cleaning and maintaining the chimney, having a new wood stove, and burning seasoned wood will help in the prevention of a fire, but it can still happen and if it does, it can cause a lot of damage.”If it gets hot there and there is actual fire and the heat can radiate out,” said Johnson. “If we’re talking about an old chimney or a chimney without a liner in it, or a cracked liner but what can happen is the spark and heat can radiate out into a surrounding structure and then that can cause a fire.”Even if you cleaned it in the spring at the end of the home heating season Johnson recommends another check before you start up the stove now. “A lot of people are diligent about cleaning when it’s colder out, come spring time you get a little less likely if you haven’t checked the chimney since then it’s a really good idea to make sure no critters have got into it, and believe it or not that’s happened quite a bit, animals will come down, a bird will make a nest, hornets, that type of thing, so even before you light the fire it’s a good idea to check it even if you have swept it in the spring.”But Johnson knows one other aspect of heating your home with wood can cause fires too, and he’d like to be proven wrong. “Someone will take out some hot ashes out of the wood stove and they’ll put it in the paper bag or a cardboard box and they’ll stick it right on the front porch, or the front deck, they’ll stick it in the garage, and not realize what seems to be cold ash there’s an ash inside or a coal inside there and starts a fire and I’ll guarantee that we’ll see at least one of those somewhere in the area this year.”