Kitchen safety resources break language barriers

While the number of structure fires have decreased over the last five years, incidence of cooking fires has increased.

To best support communities, help raise awareness and encourage safer behaviours, we’ve created cooking safety messages in a range of languages.

The set of resources includes a video, flyer and poster that highlights how to be fire safe in the kitchen as well as other fire safety tips in different languages. 

The first set of these fire safety resources are in Tongan, Samoan, Fijian and Mandarin, as well as in English. We are both proud and fortunate to have members of our Fire and Emergency whānau championing this work, sharing our messages with their respective communities. We will be developing these same resources in more languages later this year. 

Check out an example of one of the videos in Mandarin.

We hope these new resources will help us to have a presence at ethnic community events. In the past, without translated resources, this has been challenging.

The resources are all available for you to download on the Portal bookshelf here, and you can also order printed versions of the flyer and poster.

We will be working with our PRFMOs and FRMOs to help get these new resources out to communities through their set programmes of work.

Sharing these important resources with the people we serve is a key part of our wider risk reduction strategy.

As a part of Fire and Emergency, the messaging you share about fire safety in the kitchen makes a difference. It contributes to a safer New Zealand, especially for those whose first language isn’t English, or who may not be familiar with cooking in a New Zealand kitchen.