McCormick on oddly large amount of area fires, CPR and AED training and Mugs for Rugs recap

Molly McCormick, community risk educator with La Crosse Fire Department, in studio to discuss the rise in investigative fires, being AED and CPR trained and their recent Mugs for Rugs program.

La Crosse Talk airs weekdays at 6-8 a.m. Listen on the WIZM app, online here, or on 92.3 FM / 1410 AM / 106.7 FM (north of Onalaska). Find all the podcasts here or subscribe to La Crosse Talk wherever you get your podcasts.

We started there, and a collaboration with the Coulee Region Humane Society, where the fire department collected rugs from homes of seniors — because they’re a slip and fall hazard — and turned them into scratch posts.

They have taken those rugs now and made them into scratch posts, being sold for dirt cheap at the Humane Society.

We also talked about CPR and AED training that they’re doing, and how important it is to even just be informally trained on how to handle a situation where those would be needed. More on that below.

Lastly, we hit on the oddly large amount of investigative fires the La Crosse area has had to deal with. So far this year, 31 investigative fires, when in 2024 there was a total of 44. And, on average, that number hovers around 35. McCormick notes there’s no pinpoint reason for the rise in numbers, but we do brainstorm on why that might be, anyway.

As an aside to that, McCormick got into some of the everyday ways to help prevent fires and some facts people might know about when to replace smoke detectors (not just the batteries) and fire extinguishers.