So I had to call the fire department... a PSA

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Earlier, I went out to get coffee. I noticed that two doors down in my apartment building, the neighbour’s fire alarm was beeping… again!

I hate that thing. It goes off at half volume for hours on end. If the tenant isn’t home, it will beep all day. Sundays are the worst. It always goes off Sunday morning, the tenant is gone all day and so is the superintendent, so the rest of us on my floor have to hear the beeping in the hall. Fortunately, in our apartments with the door closed, it’s pretty faint.

The first time this happened, I knocked, waited, went up close and personal with the doorframe to sniff for smoke, went to see the the super was home (nope, he never is). Then I figured I’d wait it out, and call the fire department if anything changed. I didn’t want to ring in a false call for an alarm I was 90% sure was defective – and that really stuck in my craw! :mad: I was raised to respect fire alarms and “do the right thing.” I’m not expert, I should not be the one determining whether there is or is not a fire – not my job, not my expertise! But every freakin’ weekend for months this has gone on, so I knew in my heart there was no fire.

But still, I checked every half hour for a several hours to make sure the status of the non-fire hadn’t changed.

Today the alarm went off at half volume, I did my Sunday routine: Knock on tenants door, sniff, verify landlord isn’t home, go back to my apartment. But then, it went off at full volume!

Knock, sniff, no super, wait. Oo! But this time it really stuck in my craw. It was at full volume this time. Arg. Knock, sniff, no super, property management is closed for the weekend. Arg.

Okay, I was 98% sure it was just that damned defectivce alarm again. The building has alarms in each unit as well as a Big Scary Alarm for the building. Smoke in the halls will set that off, and dear Og, it shakes the walls and will send you fleeing into the night. So if there was anything really going on, we’d be okay. And yet… technically there could be an emergency, somone could be in there, passed out… Gah! I couldn’t NOT call the fire department and at least ask for advice.

And it wasn’t just me. Other tenants who are also used to that stupid thing going off at half-volume were starting to come into the hall to investigate. At full volume, you can hear a unit’s fare alarm quite well. The fact that it was BEEPBEEPBEEPing for so long had triggered everyone else’s “mental danger alarm” – this time it could for real! This was at full volume, and that’s not right. So other tenants started to congregate in the hall, no one wanted to call in a false alarm, but still… this could be genuine…

It wasn’t.

I called the firehouse directly, rather than 911 (I still knew in my heart of hearts it was just that defective alarm). They were really cool about it when I explained the damn thing goes off every weekend. But they said they had to respond to every alarm as if it was a definite thing. So they arrived with sirens screaming.

They picked the lock with a lock-pick tool (I gotta get me one of those!) They were NOT impressed. There was a stool underneath the alarm and a package of batteries on the floor next to it. The firefighter said “Well, it looks like this does happen all the time!” Apparently, the thing beeps every freaking day, and the putz who lives there hasn’t bothered to call property management to say “Hi, my fire alarms needs to be replaced. Thanks.”

Geez, when mine went on the blink, I called the super that evening and it was replaced before lunch the next day!

< grumpy soapbox>

Listen up folks: Your fire alarm does not good if you disable it when you’re home. It does no good if your neighbours are conditioned to ignore it – with an alarm that “cries wolf” no one will call the fire department to come and save your ass until it’s too late. If it’s defective, you don’t want to be relying on it to go off when it really counts, for real. And it is wrong for the fire department to rush out to a bogus call when there may be a real fire somewhere.

If your fire alarm is defective, replace the damn thing! If you rent, take 45 seconds to call your landlord. If you know that your alarm goes off all the time and you do nothing about it, then that negligence is really no different than pulling a false alarm.

Don’t be a :wally

</soapbox>

2

I’d get ahold of your super or the management company, and ask them to come replace the neighbour’s alarm. It’s doing no good to anyone as it is. Have you asked your neighbour to do this?

3

Our smoke alarm is disabled 90% of the time. The damn thing goes off when we cook (not even particularly smoky foods) so we don’t bother.

I do have on hand an ABC fire extinguisher next to my computer (mostly FOR my computer incase my $4000 baby melts or explodes).

Of course the last time I actually had to call the fire department there was a fire in my GF’s building’s hallway that didn’t set off any alarms.

4

Yeah, I am the same way. I do know better, what with being a fire chief’s son and all, but every time I use my oven (and sometimes the stove) all three of my alarms go off. There is no visable smoke, or usually none that can be smelt, either. I know it must annoy the Hell out of my neighbor (well, used to, since they are usualyl disconnected now.) I have cleaned my oven, scrubebd it good, and still, there is some invisible, odorless smoke that sets off my detectors. I also have no ventilation system for it, either, so even an hour after I am done cooking, it might go off if I put the battery back in. So what started out as taking it out when it went off, putting it back in when I am done, led to taking it out before cooking, sometimes putting it back in, and now pretty much out all the time.

I’d like to think I could do something about it…but what? All three of my detectors are different brands, so it’s not just one is over sensative. As I said, I cleaned out the oven and there is still smoke, apparantly (and no, my food isn’t burned. I’m a good cook!)

5

The fire department left a nasty note in teh tenants apartment – well, they had to since they also advise her that they had pulled the battery out of her smoke detector and it wouldn’t be working without it.

So the public embarassment of knowing the fire department was called and broke into her apartment should be enough. If I see her, I’ll ask her (I never see that person and I’m only assuming it’s a woman because I saw a pink sweater draped over a chair when the firefighters broke in). Seriously, I’ve never seen that tenant coming or going and she never seems to be home. (Maybe she has a boyfriend and stays away a lot.)

If I ever hear that thing going off again. I’ll call property management and make sure they change it. The super is as useless as a bag of hair.

6

My neighbour’s smoke alarm isn’t going off because of the stove or anything though. The sensor is just completley defective. It usually starts beeing around 9:30-10:00 am and continues beeping until she gets home late twelve hours later (at least I’ve heard it still beeping at 9:00 pm at night). It’s such a mess that it couldn’t possibly do the job it’s supposed to do.

Common sense, you’d think “Gee, that’s not right, maybe I should get a new one.” Property management would change it for free. She wouldn’t even have to be there.

bouv that’s a tough one. My fire alarm is wired in to the building. If the stove sets it off (very, very rare), I can hit the breaker to shut it off. The breaker is also hooked to some key lights so if I forget to turn it back on then I’ll find myself stumbling around before bed. So it’s hard to forget. I don’t have a fan for my stove, but there are windows in my kitchen. You have no kitchen ventilation at all? No fan or windows?

7

Boy do I understand the ‘Cries Wolf’ thing. When I lived in Lothrop Hall at Pitt, we had false alarms all the time. Usually they occurred in the middle of the night, and it was cold, so you’d have to put on your coat and then go outside and freeze until the fire department cleared the building. This began a cycle where students wouldn’t evacuate until they saw the fire department arrive (because if they found you in your room, you got a fine) knowing that the alarms weren’t an actual fire.

Then one night the escalator motor in the adjoining building (Victoria Hall) caught fire. As usual, people waited for the fire department to show up before evacuating. Thankfully it was not a very severe fire, or probably a lot of Pitt students would not have been around to graduate.

Then when I moved to NY after graduation, I was so used to false alarms happening, that I almost didn’t believe the fire alarm in my apartment building. It went off, and I thought ‘another false alarm’, but after a couple of minutes I figured I should go outside anyway, just in case. I go downstairs, reach the first floor, think ‘I’ll pick up mail on the way out.’ Only, no can do, because the first floor hall is filled with thick smoke.

Out the door quickly I go, to see firemen rushing in and hoses drawn on the outside. Find out later as the firemen were leaving (like three hours) that the reason we all had to stand outdoors in the 103F heat with the 99% humidity was that a first floor tennant’s toddler had turned on the electric oven without mommy noticing. When mommy took baby out of the apartment, the oven continued to roast until the grease inside caught fire. Eek! Good thing the fire department was close, and good thing that little ‘But what if this is the 1%…’ thing in my brain was working.

8

Last year the main building alarm went off. It’s so loud I nearly wet my pants in fear. So I locked my terrified cats in the bathroom (so I could get them into a carrier and evacuate them soon) and dashed out in the hall, as did all my neighbours. Everyone looked at me… (long story, but often tenants look to me as if I’m some kind of “tenant rep” or something, I’m not.)

So I walked down a few flights of stairs, saw the 2nd floor was hazy. It smelled like burnt supper from an oven, and smoke was smoldery brown not building-on-fire-black. But still it was a noticeable haze, it was FIRE. A panicked little old lady came up from the first floor asking “What’s going on? What’s going on?”

“There’s smoke on the second floor, we have to all go outside.” I answered. She ran off.

Back on my floor I yelled “There’s smoke on the second floor.” And waved everyone out. Then I heard a woman’s voice yell “GET THE CAT!” and everyone disappeared back into their apartments…

Everyone came back out with cat carriers, and everyone evacuated. I went outside and found the super (who them was a great, great, great super) who was saying “it’s okay, it’s okay, somebody burnt their supper in the oven.”

So altogether, the building was evacuated pretty quickly. Even with everyone going to rescue their cats The above occured over a period of just seconds (probably less than two mintues from alarm to evac). But I agree, we all came out of our apartments asking “is this a false alarm?” The main building alarm never goes off though, so we were all still thinking “Okay, this must be real. But I should ask someone…” :rolleyes:

Made for a good practice drill though. At least we do evac quickly.

9

My apartment on campus did not have fire alarms. One day the crud under the cook top where you can’t easily clean it out* caught fire. I tried turning it off and taking the pans off the burners and covering the burners with pan lids, but I could not suffocate the fire. I did not see a fire extinguisher in the apartment and did ot want to try the big hose in the hall. We tried to call 911 and even 9 911 because you had to dial 9 to get out, but you could not dial 911 from campus phones. We evacuated, closing the big metal apartment door, and went down stairs.

I asked the neighbor if we could use their phone and by the way our stove is on fire, but no such luck, he did not care that the apartment above his was on fire, at least a little bit. We waited about 30 minutes, their were no visible flames and just a bit of smoke in the hall. The door felt cool, so we opened it. The apartment was full of smoke, but not so severly that it needed more than airing out.

The fire had burnt itself out and since the cabinets were metal and the walls concrete and there was a metal fire guard around the stove, not much was burnt. The dean of students office did not seem to care about there being no fire alarm and said they would fix the stove, but we were SOL for an alarm. We looked up the number to the local fire department and complained about no smoke detectors of fire alarms. We had smoke detectors that day. The fire marshall cared very much that there were 12 apartments with no alarms.

When the battery ran out in the middle of the night and maintenance would not replace it, we had to call the dean again and remind him that the fire marshal did care. Maintenance came out and replaced it within the hour. We would have replaced it ourself, but it was over the stairwell and you needed a tall ladder or scaffold to get to it. There was no sleeping with that thing beeping, even out in the hallway.

We had tried to clean the stove thoroughly when we moved in but could not figure out how to lift the cook top. We gave up not wanting to break it. Turns out it lifted straight up and was designed to open for cleaning, but with all the crud, it was cemented shut. eww.