Just three months into the year, four people have died in fires sparked by lit cigarettes or discarded matches, a number that fire officials say is unusually high.
"This year has been a little above the norm," said Battalion Chief Mike Cole of CDF/County Fire. "It's a fluke."
Two of those deaths have been in the past week.
On Saturday, a homeless man's badly burned body was found in a makeshift campsite near the Highway 101 off-ramp at Los Osos Valley Road. Investigators believe 41-year-old William King fell asleep while smoking.
A disabled man died early Monday in a fire that caused $100,000 in damage to his Arroyo Grande house and left three others homeless. Investigators say Lon Brazelton, 65, had been smoking in bed when the blaze began at 5:15 a.m.
In January, two Pismo Beach residents -- 62-year-old Kay Corbett and 81-year-old George Gillespie -- were killed in smoking-related fires within a week of one another.
Smoking generally ranks low on the list of fire causes, Cole said.
Of the 60 structure fires the CDF responded to in 2002, only one was caused by careless smoking, he said. Three of 2003's 63 fires were sparked by lit cigarettes, whereas smoking caused one structure fire out of 53 in 2004. Just one of those smoking-related fires resulted in a fatality.
Still, inattentive or inexperienced smokers can make mistakes such as dropping ashes on a blanket or bed, emptying a burning ashtray into a garbage can or nodding off with a lit cigarette, Cole said.
"All cigarette fires are careless acts," he said. "I have a saying, 'Smoke in bed, end up dead.' It's a little crude, but it sure says it, doesn't it?"
One of Brazelton's housemates described him as a chain smoker who often went through three packs of cigarettes a day. His mattress bore several burn marks from dropped cigarettes, and he kept a jug of water and a fire extinguisher in his bedroom in case of accidents, 60-year-old Janet Sorenson said.
But what concerns fire officials most, Cole said, is when people neglect to keep the smoke detectors in their homes operational.
Residents at Brazelton's house had removed the batteries in the smoke detectors because they were being set off by cigarette smoke, said Chief Terry Fibich of the Arroyo Grande Fire Department. Had the smoke detectors been operational, firefighters would have had a better chance of saving everyone in the building, he said.
"We preach the smoke detector thing day in and day out," Cole said. "You don't want to diminish your chances of getting out of the house alive."
