IT’S TIME TO FALL back into standard time with the end of Daylight Savings Time.
Turn your clocks and watches BACK one hour before 2 a.m. on Sunday and get back that hour of sleep you lost in the spring.
Firefighters want you to use this weekend’s time change as a fire safety reminder, too.
When you turn your clocks back an hour, they want you to replace the batteries in your home and office smoke detectors, too.
Across the U.S. last year, 2,500 people were killed in fires.
Eighty three percent of those deaths came in house fires. Firefighters say if all homes had working smoke detectors, more than half of those people may have survived.
DST will return on March 13, 2011, in the U.S. and Canada.
DST was instituted in the United States during World War I in order to save energy for war production by taking advantage of the later hours of daylight between April and October.
During World War II, the federal government again required the states to observe the time change.
Between the wars and after World War II, states and communities could choose whether or not to observe DST.
In 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, which standardized DST to begin on the last Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday of October.
DST increased by four weeks in 2007 with the passage of the Energy Policy Act in 2005. The act extended Daylight Saving Time by four weeks – from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November – with the hope that it would save 10,000 barrels of oil each day through reduced use of power by businesses during daylight hours.
Arizona and Hawaii, along with some Indian reservations, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa, do not observe Daylight Saving Time.
