Every 36 hours, there is a house fire in Winston-Salem.
Fire Chief Trey Mayo hopes that a $10,000 grant to be awarded to the fire department could help further squash those numbers, he said.
“If we could prevent all unattended cooking, we would cut our residential fires in half,” Mayo said. “It can be as simple as leaving a pan of oil warming up on the stove and coming back and your kitchen’s on fire. A lot of these can be prevented.”
Winston-Salem ranked No. 67 on the country’s top 100 high-risk cities for home fires, according to a 2017 survey by The Hartford, an insurance company based in Connecticut. Among other North Carolina cities, Greensboro ranked No. 66 and Fayetteville ranked No. 22.