On Monday Finland's Safety Investigation Authority revealed that a fire in eastern Helsinki’s Vuosaari district that claimed the lives of a woman and her three children, started when the sauna stove ignited a piece of fabric.
The blaze occurred in December last year at a sixth-floor flat of an apartment building on Vuotie. A 40-year-old woman and her three children aged 7, 6 and 2 were removed from the flat, but attempts to resuscitate them failed.
The report indicated that there was no smoke detector in the home at the time. As a result, the agency is recommending that the Interior Ministry should collaborate with real estate sector players to determine how to ensure that property owners and maintenance firms are committed to installing and maintaining smoke detectors.
The agency noted that currently, the responsibility for installing and maintaining smoke detectors lies with occupants.
"Occupant responsibility for maintaining smoke detectors in itself does not seem to be working. This has been seen in many investigations," lead researcher Kai Valonen said in a statement released by the agency on Monday.
Call for safer sauna stoves
He added that responsibility for ensuring the existence of functional smoke detectors should also be shared with other parties in an appropriate manner.
"For example it would be natural for a housing association, among others, to install alarms as part of a project series."
The agency is also calling on sauna stove manufacturers to develop safer user interfaces, which it says have lagged behind development of the devices.
"Switches are often unclear, signage is poor and for example there are no signal lights to indicate that the timer or the stove is on," Valonen noted in the statement.