I was at my college’s library today and the fire alarm went off. Most people just asked each other if it was real instead of leaving. I don’t know why it went off today, but i do know there was not a real fire.
Many buildings often have false alarms whether from system tests, malfunctions, or deliberate malice.
Because of this, people question the alarm rather than responding to it, and this would be a very serious risk if there was a real fire.
How can false alarms be prevented, so people actually believe the alarm when they hear it?
System malfunctions obviously require better systems or system software.
Deliberate false alarms (which I don’t think are too common otherwise they’d go off all the time on examination days in schools and colleges I think) could be answered by some kind of surveilance perhaps some kind of cameras monitoring the alarms. Small wireless cameras are pretty cheap now.
Every fire protection professional would agree with you that nuisance (false) alarms reduce the likelihood that building occupants will react properly and evacuate the building when the alarm sounds.
I don’t know anything about the alarm system in the library, but in most cases the cause of the alarm can be identified either at the time it activates or shortly thereafter. However, it wouldn’t be typical for the cause to be announced to the occupants. In other words, the responding personnel or maintenance staff probably know exactly what caused the alarm and will take steps to reduce the likelihood that it will happen again.
Please remember that a typical fire alarm system in a large building can be activated by smoke detectors, manual pull stations, waterflow devices, duct-type smoke detectors, and similar devices. The cause could have been anything from a problem with the fire sprinkler system to a deliberate activation of a manual pull station (which does happen from time to time).
TL;DR: It’s a good idea to play it safe and evacuate. The people responsible for the fire alarm system are just as concerned about false alarms and probably already know what caused this one.
Yep, CCTV.
I once worked in a building that suddenly started having a lot of false alarms, after an upgrade & enhancement that was supposed to make the system much better. Turned out that some of the added alarms were in places that the smokers secretly went to smoke, rather than going outside like they were required to do. Once they cracked down on that, the false alarm rate went way back down.
So smokers were causing a lot of false fire alarms, just like they cause a lot (about a quarter) of actual fires.
Even simpler is dye packs. When you pull it, you hand gets covered in (blue) dye, similar to what bank robbers get. If it’s really a false alarm, just look for the person with blue hands & you know who the culprit is.
First of all if a fire alarm goes off is it worth your life not to respond because it may be a false alarm. When a building has a fire the first 2 minutes can be critical. After 2 minutes the fire can be a raging inferno and impossible to get away from. And systems do fail. So if you stay you are betting that the rest of the system will work. that is you are betting your life.
A fire alarm system has a lot of parts. And modern systems are much more sensitive. Someone can leave something in the microwave too long. And I could give you many reasons for a smoke detector without there being a real fire.
Then there are flow switches for each zone of the sprinkler system that can fail.
Dust can set off a smoke detector or a duct detector.
And there is always the person who pulls the pull station for fun or by hitting it with a cart.
Then when ever a system is up dated it is a lot of work and usually takes days or weeks. At this time the new and old system are trying to work together and sometimes they do not work well together.
Anytime a alarm goes off it should not be turned off until it has been truly determined that there is no fire. Generally that means someone from maintenance has to go to the fire panel and determine what set the alarm off. If it is safe the alarm can be shut off. Then the device that set off the alarm needs to be checked, adjusted, or replaced as necessary.
In the Air Force we had a new base fire marshal come in and he decided to have an unannounced fire drill in the building I worked in …
So the fire alarm goes off and we’re a well trained bunch of airmen and we’ve reviewed these procedure every couple months, part of the job … so I grab the first card and it says to take an axe and destroy a million dollars worth of electronic equipment … my partner gets the card that says to build a fire in the middle of the floor and burn every document … we kinda looked at each other and started to smell smoke from the shop next door because they’re already burning key cards and sending someone into our side to get the on-line cards … the entire Southern Command communications went dark in 15 seconds flat …
COMSEC custodian runs out of his office yelling for everyone to wait … stop … he’ll go check … I’m like “dammit, let me kill these damned machines” … he came back in five minutes and told us it was a drill, put all the fires out and stop emptying the safes … what a mess …
We had a another fire marshal next plane in …
Always makes me laugh … I was in mid-swing when Sgt Sox yelled at me to stop … calmest guy you could imagine in shear terror … one second away for utter disaster … it would have been days to get new equipment in and installed … an entire Air Force Command off-line …
People ignore the alarm because people are dumb. This has been the subject of considerable experiment and research; people who are not given specific and clear instructions will wait until someone tells them what to do - in tests, subjects remained seated, looking at each other for direction, even when smoke was blown under one of the doors - worse still, in the absence of trained fire wardens leading the way, the response of some people is to move toward the fire, to check out if it’s real - and if that’s the first decisive action, some of the others in the room will typically follow.
That might seem irrelevant, but I’m coming back to topic… the way to deal with frequent false alarms is to train up fire wardens and get people to begin the evacuation procedure, without delay, each and every time the alarm goes off. This is the safe and proper thing to do, because you never know whether this one is a false alarm, or the real thing. The disruption of such frequent evacuation might embarrass the responsible people into improving the quality of the systems - or it may not, but either way, when you hear the alarm, the evacuation procedure is always the right thing to do.
So the response to a fire threat is to light more fires? Weird.
Cite that smokers are responsible for 25% of all fires please.
It’s about a quarter of fire deaths, not fires.
Just a nitpick - I’m not sure it’s fair to call 22% ‘about a quarter’ - It feels like ‘more than a fifth’ would be more apt. (Or ‘twenty two percent’)
Well the OP asked how to prevent false alarms. Turning them into real threats would seem to be a legitimate mechanism. 
:dubious:
This. See social proof: when people aren’t sure what to do, they look around to see what everyone else is doing. The problem is that everyone else is doing the same thing they were doing a second ago, and the result is that pretty much everyone keeps doing what the were doing - unless it’s been pounded into them, all their lives, that they should go outside ASAP if a fire alarm is going off, regardless of what all the other monkeys might be doing.
Of course it’s not, but when the false/fake alarms are not only constant, but predictable, it gets hard to believe them. When I was in college, for the first few weeks in the dorms, the fire alarm going off in the middle of the night was a fairly regular occurrence. Probably 3-4 times per week and hopefully only once per night. It was kinda fun the first few times, but after a few weeks, it was awful. When it’s 3 am and it’s the second time they’re evacuating a dorm with 400 residents…no one wants to leave.
The RA’s did always do a good job of getting everyone out. They’d bang on every door, check every bed, I don’t recall if they keyed into all the rooms or not, but they did everything they could to rouse all the students when they knew we had no interest in getting up. Up to the (empty threat or not, true or not) saying that if they didn’t leave we could be fined by the police/fire marshall.
I can understand they cameras in the halls by the rooms wouldn’t have been a good idea, for privacy reasons. But in some of the other areas it may have been okay, and dye packs all around should have been fine.
Better to have a fire alarm that goes off when there is no fire than a fire alarm that remains silent when there is a fire.
Well running a small fan onto the alarm going off and see if its still detecting in 30 seconds ?
The idea is that if there is a fire, then it will be still sending smoke after 30 seconds,
if its just some smoker or condensation, then the fan may well be getting air from a new source, and cleaning up the air around the alarm…
They could have some requirement for multiple alarms before escalating the sirens and evacuations and so on… if its only small, or a single alarm, get someone to check whats going on ??
One place I was at had that - the alarm went off but it said “this is a first level alert - do not evacuate.” Obviously all staff were to react to it.
The reason it wasn’t an evacuation siren at the first alarm was that it was a rather large public swimming pool … its really not going to burn much, but if there is a fire the poisonous gases might cause people to get sick, if the fire went on for an hour … It was probably just some condensation due to weather changes during the afternoon (warm humid air inside, cool outside… )
This is great! I ALWAYS picked the “smash stuff with an ax” card when we had fire drills. Never got to smash anything though 
I do not know of any smoke detectors with a delay and am not sure you could make a dependable detector with a delay.
Some Hotels may require multiply detectors for full building alarm. When I was working in a hotel every so often a guest taking a shower would trip an detector in a room. I would get a radio call that room ----- smoke detector was going off. I would have security meet me at the room to check it out. If there was not fire or smoke then I would call the front desk to clear the alarm. But if a smoke detector in any of the public areas or offices went into alarm the horns and whistles would go off in the complete building.