Welcome! Your post was in no way too long. Good information is always welcome.
My fire fighter husband agrees with your post 100%.
Stay around, we can alwys use good help.
Another common feature of firefighter mode is to disable the “electric eye” that will keep the doors open if somebody is in the doorway. The doors respond only to the open & close buttons.
Why? Because otherwise the smoke from the fire would cause the elevator to believe someone/something was in the doorway and the doors could never be closed.
That is part of why they advise ordinary building occupants to never use the elevators in a fire. If the elevator goes to a smoky floor and the doors open, it (and you) are trapped there. That’s probably not good for your health.
In this sense, the modern elevators with “electric eye” door obstruction sensors are less safe than the old pre-1980s kind with the mechanical bumpers.
When I worked in an office building (actually, a lab building, but it had offices) not too long ago, each floor had a designated person responsible for checking to see that all the rooms were emptied of people (each room came with a little red doorknob sign that the last person to leave would hang on the door to make checking faster). Once you had checked your floor, you’d tell whoever was responsible for the upkeep of the building (I want to say the Facilities Manager in our case) and they’d tell the firefighters. Presumably, this person grabs the key(s) to the elevators on her way out of the office when the alarm goes off and gives it to the firefighters when they show up.
Not that this is precisely on topic, but pushing the button to cross a street often means that the signal’s usual timing will be delayed in the direction that the person is crossing. That is, a longer green period will be allowed so that the pedestrian can cross comfortably.
And the Close Door button gives the elevator’s owner an option. The elevator can leave its door open longer at a floor when called by default; should someone get on and be in a hurry, they can hit the Close Door button and shorten the wait. I’ve been in numerous hotels where this is how the system works. As a young’un, I used to play with such things until I knew what was going on.
I have heard an alternate theory about the mysterious ‘close door’ button.
The basic premise is that keeping the button pressed will prevent the lift (elevator) from stopping at any other floor until it reaches your destination. The system was apparently installed to allow cleaning staff etc. to have easy access to all the floors without having to be bothered by other people hailing the lift during its journey.
This has always worked when I’ve tried it - but, of course, I have no way of knowing if this was just coincidence!
This idea fascinates me. I can’t wait to try it. I work in a small office building, but I commute by train, and it’s a real pain when I am leaving at a rush hour time (say, right at 5pm) because I get stopped on three or four different floors.
A very recent article from the New Yorker on pretty much exactly this theory. It’s a Talk of rhe Town piece, so I’d take the intention to be amusing rather than strictly accurate.
I know it definitely works, at least, on older elevators. I lived in an 11 story dorm that was alleged to have the oldest and fastest elevators on campus. It was indeed possible to skip floors–a lot of times students on the upper floors would skip all the other floors during if they were running late to class. I would be very frustrated when I was skipped, as I lived on the 9th floor! They also used the skip floor button during move in/out.
We get the keys from the fire comtrol room. We can open this door with a key from the “Knox Box”. On our units in Austin, we can request a radio signal that allows us to retrieve a key from our knox box controller. This key allows us to open a safe with keys that control access to the building. We are currently upgrading this to allow us to access this key with a “PIN” as our radio signals are hit and miss. If this portion of the building were on fire … we would extinguish it and go from there.
