By David Slone
Times-Union

WARSAW — Family Safety Day started in 2004 after a local girl’s Halloween costume caught fire and her mother wanted to promote fire safety and another mother lost her daughter in a car accident.

Twenty years later, not only has Family Safety Day become an annual free event by the Warsaw-Wayne Fire Territory, but it has continued to grow every year.

This year, Family Safety Day will be 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 14 at Warsaw Central Park, 119 E. Canal St.

Recently, WWFT Chief’s Assistant Heather Vogts was looking through records and came across a 2004-06 binder for Family Safety Day that included a number of laminated articles about it.

“It made me realize that it’s the 20th year because it started in ’04, and I was like, ‘Oh, I think it would be fantastic just to get the original story and then kind of go to where it’s evolved today,’” Vogts said in an interview Tuesday, Aug. 6, at Edgewood Middle School.

The interview took place at Edgewood because the mother of the girl whose Halloween costume caught on fire is Principal JoElla Hauselman.

“I was so glad the fire department took this on, and it made logical sense because one of the things I was promoting was fire safety after my daughter’s costume caught on fire,” Hauselman said.

Her daughter, Zoe, 4 years old at the time, wore a Disney Little Mermaid costume that failed the flammability test.

“They said that her costume literally was engulfed within six seconds. She was outside, I was in getting the camera so I could get a picture. My son comes running in saying, ‘Mom, Zoe’s on fire!’ I go running out there, and her arms were up and she was a ball of fire, and I just grabbed her,” Hauselman recalled.

To raise awareness about fire safety, they later made a video but didn’t stop there.

“My thing was, no one should have to go through that, and then I found out later that several other little girls wearing the same costume caught on fire throughout the United States. So it really made some national attention as well,” she said. “I did go through the Consumer Product Safety Commission. They recalled the costume, but it takes a while. They came out to our house and scraped off what was left of the costume from the sidewalk and then they bought the burnt costume.”

Hauselman went out and bought the same costume again to see if she missed something that would have told her it was not flame retardant. She remembered that all it said was “Packed with fairy dust by Tinkerbell.”

“I thought I was buying from a reputable company. I really was shocked,” she said.

She wanted to find out what the standard for costumes was, and then wanted to raise people’s awareness that their costumes don’t have to be flame retardant.

“PJs do, but your costumes do not. So that was a learning experience for me, but then it worries me because those costumes are still out there,” Hauselman said.

The first event, which was held on the county courthouse lawn, included a pumpkin painting area, with the pumpkins being donated, to show people that they could do something else with them instead of as luminaries. Instead of people wearing masks, they encouraged people to paint their faces.

Firefighters bought a bunch of costumes from different stores and set them on fire so people could see how fast they could burn.

They also had a few other booths to help promote fire safety.

“It was very small, it was very focused,” Hauselman said of the first event.

Ann Sweet was the other mother who helped start Family Safety Day and she had a booth about red light running, advocating for putting cameras on stoplights. Sweet had been working with The Papers reporter Stacey Anderson on red light running awareness.

Sweet founded Focus on Safety, a traffic safety advocacy group, after her daughter’s death in 1997. Shawnee Ulrey, 21, was killed when a semi tractor-trailer hit her vehicle after ignoring a red light.

“Ann did a great job of advocating and raising awareness for — especially Highway 30 — just the dangers of red light running,” Hauselman said. “There is actually a camera installed at that particular intersection where her daughter was killed, as a result of (Sweet’s) work. There was at least one camera put in to catch other red light runners.”

Hauselman said the turnout for Family Safety Day the first year was pretty good. Then for the next few years, the fire department “just grew it and grew it to where we had the helicopter there. I think it was the Center Lake Pavilion where they had different booths in there for having IDs set up for your child, like missing children. There were different organizations that came in and just promoted total safety for your children.”

She said it just turned into an amazing way to increase safety for all the children in the community.

Vogts said that according to information she found, the fire department officially took Family Safety Day over from the three-person committee by 2006. That committee now includes about 10 people. Hauselman said the fire department continued with the costume burning awareness for a while, but expanded it into so much more.

“It just grew. The last time I had attended, it was extremely well attended, and so I just feel like that they turned it into something that was really very powerful,” Hauselman stated.

Vogts said this is her first year with the fire department and with the event’s committee as Shirley Fetrow retired earlier this year from the WWFT.

“I was going through all the binders because she kept very detailed records, and I’m just like, ‘This is fantastic!’ The fact that it’s 20 years, I don’t think people realize it’s been going on for this long,” Vogts said.

Hauselman said when it first started it was just a small idea of raising awareness and they really counted on the media getting the story out. There was no real social media back when it started like there is now, she said.

Vogts said there were a couple years where they couldn’t have Family Safety Day because of COVID-19, but it returned in 2023 and the committee is growing it a bit more.

“We’re kind of at a max capacity within the park and within the pavilion that we’re able to do, but we have some new vendors that we haven’t had. We have a lot of new sponsors this year, which has really helped us be able to grow it,” she said. “We’re able to give Kone Ice free to every single person who comes to the event because of the sponsorships.”

Vogts said there will be two outdoor tents this year for Family Safety Day. One is strictly for C.A.R.E.S. resources and related vendors like Bowen Center. The fire department will have their tent that shows equipment and live demonstrations.

In the Zimmer Biomet Center Lake Pavilion will be things like Walmart vision screening, Lutheran and Parkview hospital representatives. “So we just have different resources all over,” Vogts said.

Emergency and utility vehicles will be on hand for people to look at, while Kosciusko REMC will have its voltage trailer there. The air ambulance helicopter will land at Central Park, and there’s going to be a bounce house.

A little different this year will be the raffle of two safety baskets. In each one there will be safety equipment like a fire extinguisher, smoke detector, carbon monoxide detector and other gear. Free bikes again will be raffled off, and Vogts said they’re doing goodie bags this year. The first 250 people who visit the registration table can get the free goodie bags.

Family Safety Day is made possible in large part because of sponsors like KREMC, Bowen Health Clinic, Lutheran Health Network, Wildman, Family Express, Fellowship Missions, Warsaw Professional Fire Fighters Local 5461, Indiana American Water, Crouse, The Dr. Dane and Mary Louise Miller Foundation and the WWFT.

“When we started it, it was just this brainchild, and it was like, ‘What can we do?’ It was so small that the little bit we did, we felt that at least we did something. And then we kept working with the fire department, and it was, ‘Can we do this another year?’ And then, ‘Can we do this another year?’ And then by the third year into it, it was just like grow, grow, grow and it took on a life of its own. I would have never guessed that, but I’m really glad it did,” Hauselman stated.