The short answer is that a mountain house fails differently from a house in town. A fire department is further away, water may arrive by tender rather than by hydrant, and the heating season runs through most of the year. The plan therefore has to work without help in the first minutes, and almost all of the risk sits in three places: the alarm layout, the heat source, and what the people in the house can actually do once an alarm sounds at three in the morning.
The household side of that work is covered in plain language by home fire safety material at the Oldest City Fire Journal, an independent magazine about fire safety for St. Augustine and St. Johns County, Florida. Its weather and its building stock are coastal rather than alpine, but the questions it answers, where alarms go, how a cooking fire is stopped, how a household leaves a house at night, are the same questions a property at altitude has to settle.
Where should smoke and carbon monoxide alarms go in a mountain house?
An alarm layout is designed around sleeping, not around rooms. One alarm goes inside each sleeping room, one in the hallway outside them, and one on every level of the house including the basement and any room with a fuel-burning appliance. On a rural property two additions are worth making. Heat detectors or a monitored link belong in a shop, a barn or a garage, where dust and cold make a standard smoke alarm unreliable and where a fire can burn for a while before anyone notices. Interconnection matters more than usual: the alarm in the shop should be able to wake the person asleep above it.
Carbon monoxide deserves its own placement rule. It belongs near the sleeping area and near the boiler or the wood stove, at a height the manufacturer specifies, and it needs a battery date written on the back. Both kinds of alarm have a service life printed on the label, ten years for most smoke alarms and five to seven for many carbon monoxide units, and a unit that has never been tested with the test button is a decoration rather than a device.
What starts a fire in a house that heats with wood?
Wood heat is a managed risk. Creosote builds up in a chimney that runs cool, and a chimney fire is what follows; a yearly sweep and a flue thermometer do more for a house than any other purchase on this list. Clearances are the second item. A stove, a flue and a single-wall pipe each carry a specified distance to combustibles, the clearance is measured from the appliance rather than from the hearth pad, and storing firewood, cardboard or a broom inside that distance is the ordinary mistake that starts the fire. Ash belongs in a metal container with a lid, outside, on a surface that cannot burn, because ash that looks cold can hold an ember for a day.
The third item is the envelope. Where heat and smoke travel is decided by the way the house is built, and the same assemblies that hold warmth in a cold month change how quickly a smoke layer reaches a bedroom ceiling; the wall and roof details are described in the note on a thermal barrier in an external wall.
The first minute
Most house fires begin small and in a kitchen, and the first minute decides the outcome. A lid on a pan fire, or a sheet pan slid over it, removes the oxygen; water on a grease fire spreads it; flour thrown at a flame can carry a flash of fire with it. The extinguisher belongs where the fire is likely, which means in the kitchen and near the shop door, not in a cupboard at the far end of the house, and it needs a rating for the fires that can happen there: ordinary combustibles, flammable liquids and energized electrical equipment. Anyone who would have to walk past a fire to fetch the extinguisher should leave the house instead.
A plan that works at night
An escape plan is written for the worst version of the evening: dark, smoke at the ceiling, one adult carrying a child, a guest who has never slept in the house. Two ways out of every sleeping room, one of them a window that opens and has not been painted shut. A meeting point outside that everyone can find without a light, such as the mailbox or the driveway gate. A rule that nobody goes back in for anything. A written note for guests and for anyone who looks after an elderly resident, because a visitor who has been told the plan once will not remember it in smoke. Every door on the route should close, since a closed door buys minutes. The home fire section of the US Fire Administration publishes the alarm and escape-plan guidance in a form a household can print and keep.
A repeatable next step
Pick one evening this month and run the house through its own plan: press the test button on every alarm, walk the route from each bedroom with the lights off and count the seconds, then check that the clearances around the stove are still empty. Write the date on the alarm and the result in the property file, and repeat the walk after any renovation, any new appliance and any new person living in the house.