The fire alarm just went off again. It goes off about once or twice a week, either because of testing or a builder on another floor stirring up dust or some other dumb reason. And each time we have to evacuate just in case. We’re the first occupants in this building and have had to suffer through all the glitches, from no heat for days on end to leaky windows to doors falling off their hinges. Now the fire alarm is making its shrill voice heard on a regular occasion. What a pain in the ass! :mad: One of these days we’ll rebel and refuse to evacuate just because the alarm is going off and we all die of smoke inhalation as a result.
I guess I’m kinda lucky, though. I work on the second floor but I’m disabled and stairs are a definite no-no, so I get to wait at the top of the stairs with my designated helper-person until we get the all-clear. However, in the event of a real fire, I would be the last one out because they don’t want the disabled person clogging the stair well and killing the able-bodied people. I hope my husband sues if I get burnt up as a result.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
On our last base, the Army would set family housing alarms off specifically to make sure every one did heed them and leave. They would go door to door checking, and if you hadn’t left, for any reason, you got a ticket, and the military members chain of command was notified.
Man is that ANAL, or what?! leave it to the Army! I’m Air Force, and we never did stuff like that! Now having said that, I firmly believe that fire alarms are not to be ignored. The only exception I’ve ever made was while staying in VAQ; The alarm would go off nightly, and it was the middle of winter.
Once I determined I had a viable escape route directly out my window, and couldn’t be trapped, I ignored it.
VB
Remember, you can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish!
Oh, we are AF too, but have been stationed on Army bases the past two times (Grrr…@#%!! jointness!), and yes, we did consider it just a tad anal, especially the one they did at 3 a.m. in early March.
I’ll refrain from preaching about leaving when fire alarms go off (CatInHat, you beat me with the Seaton Hall comment). Honestly, though, the only fire alarm activations that I have gone to where everyone was out was in school/daycare type occupancies. Apartment buildings, industrial facilities, and my personal favorite, commercial (smoke pouring out of a store in the mall, alarms sounding, heavy fire in the store, and people are walking in to shop. Hello!?!?).
Anyway, like I said, I won’t preach about this one, most people can guess my opinion.
I’m with CatinHat on this one. Those cretins who’d been setting false alarms for “entertainment” certainly bear some responsibility, in my mind, for those deaths!
When I was in college (Morehead State, in case there are any other alumni on the Board), it was a regular occurrance for some dickweed to pull the fire alarm in our dorm late every Thursday night. Usually we evacuated, but I remember one night my brother/roommate and I were exhausted. Knowing that the RA would be checking the room, we both got out of bed and climbed into our closets. The RA knocked on the door and then let himself in, just long enough to take a quick glance around. After he left, we just got back in our beds.
Okay, not particularly interesting, and we certainly got away with much worse. I’m just reminiscing.
I worked in a recently-finished office building. As part of certification, they had two fire alarms a week for about 2 months, affecting 3 floors at a time.
People got pretty blaise about them and started ignoring them. (We had one meeting with Navy customers, and the guy running meeting told them to ignore it, which they did.)
Then Arlington, VA FD told our office manager that the company’d be fined $1000 for every person still in our suite during an alarm. And she told us that the $1000 would come out of our pay.
Myself, I’d go out at every alarm, whether it was a test, false, or whatever.
I still expect the firemen to hand out lollypops like they did when we had fire alarms in elementary school.
Judges 14:9 - So [Samson] scraped the honey into his hands and went on, eating as he went. When he came to his father and mother, he gave some to them and they ate it; but he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey out of the body of the lion.
Judges 14:9 - So [Samson] scraped the honey into his hands and went on, eating as he went. When he came to his father and mother, he gave some to them and they ate it; but he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey out of the body of the lion.
Gr8Kat, I feel your pain. My company recently developed a couple of buildings on the campus of NCSU and it had similar problems. No, I don’t manage them. The reason for all of the false alarms (outside of contractor error) is that the duct detectors - sensors in the HVAC (Heating/Venting/Air Conditioning) ductwork that detect smoke, heat and shutdown the HVAC if detected so as not to feed the fire oxygen - are SUPER sensitive! More so than detectors made just ten years ago. Better safe than sorry.
Now let me tell you a story that happened last week. I received a fire alarm call along with several power outage calls. I drive to the office complex I manage and see six (6) fire trucks but no fire (thank goodness!). I go the the building with the higher profile (and higher maintenance) tenant. I see that there is a brown-out in the building as well as a pulled a pull-station. I reset the pull-station and follow fire fighters through the building looking for the source of the “burning electrical smell”. Nothing found. Everything’s fine except for the brown-out.
I go across the park to the pharmaceuticals lab and check on their problem. Similar situation, brown-out, someone pulled a pull-station, follow the fire fighters, etc. As I was leaving, I overheard one of the scientists mention that the building was full of smoke! I ran into the safety officer & he confirmed the smoke and mentioned that they were actually involved in a debate as to whether or not to evacuate the building or not due to the smoke, when some one beat them to the punch.
As I mentioned, once a fire alarm goes off, the HVAC shuts down as well as fume hoods in labs. Well, while they were debating, a lot of the smoke was being vented out of the building and into the air via the fume hoods. The wind happned to be blowing towards the other building where the odor was captured in that building’s HVAC system. Those people smelled it and pulled the pull-station!
All of this because the Duke Power had a piece of equipment break causing the buildings to operate on just 2 legs of 3-phase power. All of HVAC units on the pharmaceutical labs burned out creating the “burning electrical smell”.
And the kicker, I was the only one to put 2+2 together! I found the fire chief and pointed to the trees blowing in the wind and explained the HVAC/debate in the lab building. He concurred.
One other thing that the article posted by AWB didn’t mention is that Boland Hall (the dorm where the fire broke out) has had numerous false alarms recently. When the alarm went off for real, it was ignored.
My last year of college, I lived in an apartment building that experienced many false alarms. As the year went on, fewer and fewer people evacuated. The fire department was really PO’d about the whole situation. I hope they fixed it eventually.
Never attribute to malice anything that can be attributed to stupidity.
– Unknown
Ignoring the legality and morality involved, I have never understood what was supposed to be funny about false fire alarms. It’s terribly unimaginative, and people standing around, usually freezing and either bored or pissed off once they realize there is no fire, just doesn’t strike me as rib-tickling humor. The only way that false fire alarms make ANY sense as “entertainment” is if the miscreants pull the fire horn in a dorm or hotel and expect people to come bolting out of the building in the nude or near-nude. That’s a slim reed on which to risk fines or even potential jail time, not to mention potentially endangering life and safety. Then again, the people who think turning in false fire alarms is entertainment are not the brightest bulbs in the first place.
When I was in college, the newest of the 4 dorms on campus actually caught fire and had to be evacuated. The residents had to be re-housed for the remainder of the year while repair was ongoing. It was really a huge mess and inconvenient for everyone. Luckily, no one was hurt and not much property was irreparably damaged.
I always made sure to live in the old buildings, particularly the one that had already been involved in 2 fires years and years before. In its rebuilt state, that building wouldn’t have burned if it was doused in kerosine.
In addition to Seton Hall, a dorm (Williard Hall) on my camups (Heidelberg College) burnt down last Saturday. No one (students or firefighters) was hurt, and all the students have been relocated. We even made CNN.
(I didn’t live in Willard–YAY!)
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.”
Kipling
I was staying in a hotel once, on the 17th floor, and I was just getting out of the bathtub and into my nightgown when the fire alarm went off. Elevators were down so I went down 17 flights of stairs with my husband, barefoot in a nightgown… then we got to mill around the lobby for 20 minutes or so until they got the small stovetop grease fire in the kitchen under control and let everyone back to their rooms. Not fun. I’m just glad there were no sprinklers for that! Barefoot, nightgown + wet would have sucked worse.
My company recently developed a couple of buildings on the campus of NCSU and it had similar problems. No, I don’t manage them. The reason for all of the false alarms (outside of contractor error) is that the duct detectors - sensors in the HVAC (Heating/Venting/Air Conditioning) ductwork that detect smoke, heat and shutdown the HVAC if detected so as not to feed the fire oxygen - are SUPER sensitive! More so than detectors made just ten years ago. Better safe than sorry.