In our system, we had two tones for “Wait for instructions” and “Evacuate immediately”, which were slow beeps and fast beeps.
The problem was, the frequency of the beeps weren’t different enough, so when it went off for real, you had to stop and think, “Is that the fast or slow beeps?”
How much are they really meant to train the occupants versus discovering if the building has adequate well documented fire exits in circumstances that are not an actual fire?
That’s a different question, isn’t it? You asked if the alarm was the same. It was. The fact that people usually knew it was a drill ahead of time was in fact an obvious difference, that’s been stated above.
My workplace does occasional drills and also tests the alarm every week Wednesday mornings just before lunch. They have a system where they evaculare by building/wing, with an unnecessarily long recorded message that either says to sit and wait or evacuate, and announce before the tests that it’s just a test, ignore it.
I honestly think that the weekly test makes things noticably less safe, as it trains people to just ignore the alarm. We have semi-regular false alarms (there’s a lab, stuff happens), and not long ago had one where the alarm went off a few minutes before the scheduled test… They had to announce over the intercom system that it was not a test, and please could everyone evacuate.
Oh, and another genius feature is, in the lab, it shuts down the power automatically if the ‘evacuate’ signal comes on, including during the tests. This would make sense, except it includes the extractor in the fume hood… so anyone using the fume hood when the alarm goes off can get a lungful of whatever toxic chemicals they were using in there.
What is the opposite of “brilliant”, by the way?
In the UK? It’s normally still ‘brilliant’, just dripping with sarcasm.
Regular fire drills are probably also good for teaching the public at large what to do in general for a fire alarm. Like in a grocery store or at the gym.
I was at a movie marathon at a university a few weeks ago and we were in the middle of a crappy 3D sci-fi movie when the fire alarm went off. At first we thought it was somehow part of the movie (to make it less crappy) but we all eventually slipped on our shoes and grabbed our coats and hustled out. Burnt popcorn. Of course, we all were half asleep and many people were in pajamas an it was 5 degrees out, so we stood much closer to the building than we should have. But it’s safe to say that everyone there had some experience with fire drills thanks to school and work, so we all knew what to do.
Recently someone brought up to me that they would have no idea what to do in an active shooter situation, and I was like “huh, me neither.” If you’re over 45 and haven’t been in a school setting since 2000, there’s a very good chance you don’t have any ALICE training. I know that some workplaces have it, but I’ve worked from home since then and this person was a stay-at-home mom so neither of us have come across it.
So, I’d hope that if I’m in a grocery store or a gym or a church or whatever and there’s a shooter that someone else in the building can tell me what to do.
The classic example of their effectiveness is Morgan Stanley during the 9/11 tragedy where all but 13 of nearly 2700 Morgan Stanley employees were rescued:
I think they are mainly meant to have people behave in a certain, predictable and manageable way rather than running crazy for the exits.
Same idea as the muster practice at the beginning of any cruise.
This cite says fairly effective-
https://www.onlinecprcertification.net/blog/how-effective-are-safety-drills-in-preparing-employees/
I understood that reference.
When I did my adventure-of-a-lifetime sailing trip, we did fire drills, and I think an abandon-ship drill. When the bell rang during a storm, and one of the mates called “all hands on deck”, I thought someone was nuts to be doing a man-overboard drill on a night like that. I grabbed my survival suit and life jacket, and went up to the deck.
It wasn’t a drill, and we all went to our posts and did what we were supposed to. I do still bristle a bit when people say “all hands on deck” in a business context. They think that getting the quarterly report out on time is an emergency. It’s not.
We should let you all burn!
When I was a grad student doing long planned complex experiments that required odd hours, we would got a spate of fire alarms. I’d dutifully, close the doors and walk out as trained, only to again find that it was a false alarm and not a real fire.
As wrong as it might be, when I’m elbow deep in an experiment that I leave and ruin after 3 days of work or shut the door and continue working for the critical 20 minutes,….you can bet that is what I wound up doing.
I didn’t burn up and the alarms always turned out to be false, non-fire, non-safety issues.
They were probably also there to make sure that nobody else in the room was in a direct line from the windows. Though that’s harder if the room has windows all along the hall side.
And the fact that they were able to do that without direct coordination between them says that the US military does a very good job of training for these sorts of situations.
It’s fairly common for university students to set off the fire alarms, for some unfathomable reason usually in the exam period. The alarm is the same as the drill alarm, and instructors and students have no way of knowing if it’s a real or false alarm. People respond well–instructors have a small script, a little more helpful than “RUN!” and model appropriate behaviour. People depart smoothly and quickly without trampling anyone and assemble outside for headcounts.
Once there was a real fire–someone lit a box of books in a hallway. Lots of smoke, the alarms were set off, we all headed outside. One prof then staggered out, carrying the flaming box. A better man than I, but then, I’ve been waiting all my life to grab a fire hose and soak something.
I worked in a 6-story building that housed several thousand people. IIRC, they had two fire drills every year, and we were warned a couple weeks ahead of time, but not the exact day or time. One time the alarms went off, and everybody started moving in an orderly fashion toward the exits, with a lot of people wondering if it was a drill or not. By the time we had made it down the stairs to the second floor, though, we saw that the fire doors had closed and through the window, we saw smoke. It turns out that a bag of popcorn was a little overdone in a microwave, filling the hall with acrid smoke. The guilty party happened to be one of the most well-liked employees in the entire building, so she got teased a lot about it but that was it. And the evacuation went very smoothly, probably because we drilled regularly. In my experience, fire drills are very effective.
They were effective in my experience. The not drills ended up being not a big deal but they were a bomb threat and an overreaction to a minor chemical spill.
The company that moved into the other half of the very old building where I work replaced the only person on their side who knew anything about building logistics with someone who didn’t. I happened to be over there a couple years later to access some old electrical panels. I had to show them where those particular panels were. They were in one of the building passageways on their side that leads to an exit in the alley, but had boxes stacked in front of the panels and the exit. They literally had no idea there was an exit there. If there had been a fire, they’d have been screwed. My company uses some toxic chemicals so we’ve all been trained on emergency procedures, but since they don’t use anything toxic, they never bothered holding a drill. Now they know.
A year later, the building had a false fire alarm, and they didn’t know where the panel was to shut it off after the fire dept came, or where the key was kept to access it, or which of the 30 keys it was once they found the keys.
I have been the safety floor captain for many years in a ten story building with ~1000 employees. We had a very thorough fire drill twice a year. We did have two actual fires. One time everyone got out in an orderly and safe manner. Went to the designs gathering point, etc without knowing if there was an actually a fire.
The other time there was an executive hosting a meeting of their staff who had come in from various other cities for the meeting. She yelled at the floor Captain that she wasn’t wasting precious meeting time on the stupid fire drill. It was a real fire, a big one, gutted the cafeteria. The fireman went in to get them out. It seemed like there would be no consequences as she was tight with the CEO. We were canceled by our insurance carrier, not just for our corporate HQ, but for all our stores as well, and of course our brokers told us we were uninsurable with her as COO. That’s when she got fired.
At my current company we haven’t had a fire drill since I’ve been here. Considering we have several hundred people in the building, I’m not sure what’s up. We have computer based training on what to do in case the alarms go off, but not drills. Now that I’m thinking about this it’s rather worrying.