Change your clock, change your battery. We hear it a couple of times every year, and now is one of those times. We spring forward one hour Saturday night for daylight savings, and fire departments everywhere are encouraging us to check our smoke detectors.

But one Ozarks community is going even further. In Willard, volunteers with the fire district, the city, and the Community Emergency Response Team spent most of the day going door to door, to make sure everyone has proper warning in case of a fire.

The beep of a smoke detector is a sound that helps ensure fire safety. And in Willard, for the first time, they're making sure everyone will hear it if the unthinkable were to happen.

"If something would've happened, it could have been bad," says Willard resident Steve Duffel. He has smoke detectors throughout his house, but one recently quit working. "I have a smoke detector that, for whatever reason, it alarmed, and when I replaced the battery, it wouldn't stop alarming, so I took it down and misplaced it," says Duffel.
So he's thankful for a new one, provided and installed, free of charge, to make sure his family is safe. "I think it's a great public service," Duffel says.

About two dozen Willard city workers, firefighters and CERT members volunteered their Saturday to knock on every door in town, replacing detectors and batteries. "It's kinda nice to have somebody come around and check," says resident Kevin Young.

Even folks with hard-wired smoke detectors got the beep test. "You can twist your smoke detector off the wall and unplug the wire, and push the test button, and it should chirp, and that way you know the battery is working," says Willard firefighter Marcus Stoker. That way, if a fire started while the electricity was out, people like Young and his family would still wake up.

And volunteers know everyone will sleep better, even if it is one hour less. "Every house. Want to make sure they're all safe," says Stoker.

Volunteers visited around 1,000 houses in Willard, and along with the friendly service, they also handed out a survey that will help the city get some feedback on different issues and services. One of those questions has to do with fire safety- asking if folks think it would be worth paying slightly higher property taxes in order to have paid firefighters and a faster response time. Right now, they're all volunteer.