Every October, downtown Huntington gets loud. Fire engines, ladder trucks, and whatever floats the Fire Marshal's Bureau can round up roll down 4th Avenue between 12th and 8th Streets, sirens wailing, while families line the sidewalks and kids wave at the crews. It is a parade with a purpose: the annual Fire Prevention Week Parade, hosted by the Huntington Fire Department, which this year steps off at 7 p.m. on Monday, October 5.
The parade is free and open to anyone who wants to stand along the route. There is no ticket, no gate, no capacity limit — just a stretch of downtown street and a fall evening. Organizations that want to enter a float or a piece of fire apparatus can register in advance, which is how the procession fills out beyond the department's own rigs.
This is not a new tradition. When WSAZ covered the event in 2016, it was already the 63rd annual Fire Prevention Parade. The station called it "a fall tradition" as sirens blared down 4th Avenue, and the theme that year — "Don't Wait, Check the Date" — was a reminder to replace smoke alarms every ten years. The parade has carried a different message almost every year since.
What stays constant is the audience the department is trying to reach: the event is a way to bring awareness to the community and to bring people together — and, just as importantly, to let children see the trucks up close and get familiar with the firefighters who might one day show up at their door. A kid who has already met a firefighter is a kid less likely to hide under a bed during a fire.
The 2026 theme comes from the National Fire Protection Association, which has sponsored Fire Prevention Week since the observance began and which the Huntington department partners with each year. The campaign is called "Charge into Fire Safety: Safe Charging Is a Superpower," and it turns the spotlight on a hazard that has quietly moved into nearly every American home: lithium-ion batteries.
Those batteries power phones, tablets, laptops, power tools, toys, e-bikes, and scooters. They are also capable, when damaged or charged improperly, of overheating, catching fire, and even exploding. The NFPA's guidance is deliberately simple. Use the charger that came with the device, or one the manufacturer has approved. Charge on a hard, flat surface — not on a bed, couch, or pillow, where heat can build up with nowhere to go. Stop using any device that becomes very hot, swells, smokes, or smells unusual. Unplug once a device is fully charged. And take extra care with the big batteries: charge e-bikes, scooters, and power tools outside and away from exits, so that a failure has somewhere harmless to go. Travelers are advised to keep devices visible while charging and never to charge them in an overhead compartment; e-cigarettes and vapes should not be charged on an aircraft at all.
"Properly charging devices can significantly reduce the risk of fires and associated hazards," said Lorraine Carli, the NFPA's vice president of outreach and advocacy. "Making informed choices and practicing simple habits are critical to these efforts."
Fire Prevention Week itself is older than most Americans realize. It commemorates the Great Chicago Fire, which broke out on October 9, 1871, killed roughly 300 people, left about 100,000 homeless, and destroyed more than 17,000 structures. On the fire's 40th anniversary in 1911, the Fire Marshals Association of North America — the oldest membership section of the NFPA — began promoting the anniversary as a way to teach fire safety rather than simply mourn. In 1925, President Calvin Coolidge issued the first presidential proclamation of Fire Prevention Week, and the observance has been marked nationally ever since. It is, by the NFPA's reckoning, the longest-running public health observance on the American calendar.
Huntington's own fire service predates all of that. The city's volunteer firefighters have served the community since 1843, and the department now runs fire suppression, prevention, public education, rescue, and disaster response out of stations across the city. The parade is the department's most visible public-education effort of the year — a chance to put the message in front of people who might not otherwise read a safety pamphlet.
That is the quiet logic of a fire parade. The sirens and the lights are the hook; the message is what lingers. A family that walks down to 4th Avenue on a Monday evening, watches the trucks roll past, and goes home thinking about where they plug in their phone overnight has gotten exactly what the department hoped for. The route runs from 12th Street to 8th Street, and the whole thing is over in about an hour. But the point of Fire Prevention Week is what happens in the other 8,759 hours of the year — in kitchens, garages, and bedrooms, where the batteries are always charging.