We have drills every few months in our clinic. The problem is, we’re a little annex building amid all the main, 8 story buildings. So they always forget about us. After about half an hour, someone will wander to one of the other buildings and call around to see if we can go back in. Sucks if we’re busy, but nice if we need a little break in the fresh air.
My freshman year at college our dorm would have the fire alarms pulled 10-20 times a night every Saturday. A guy on my floor rigged up a device out of cotton balls and duct tape and taped it over the fire alarm loudspeaker thing one time. Fuckers like to get drunk and pull the fire alarm. Then one time some fucker got drunk and actually started a fire.
We had a funny situation at work with a bomb threat once. Someone called the police and said there was a bomb in our building. They checked around but didn’t evacuate. Then the person called back and again said there was a bomb in the building. They did nothing. Then the person called and said there was a bomb in the park. Then a bomb blew up in the park. Then, about 2 hours later, one of the cops said “hey, maybe we should evacuate that building that was getting all those bomb threats earlier today.” Then they evacuated our building.
In the category of “if this were a real emergency, we’d all be screwed”
While in grad school, one evening there was a planned, and announced fire drill. So the stupid sirens went off, the lights started flashing, and we exited the building post-haste.
Into the courtyard between the building we’d been in and the neighboring building/complex. (college campus, plenty of underground (and sometimes above ground) tunnels). Still, in a real emergency, it would have been a good idea to turn to the right or the left (and thus walk outside) rather than walk into the courtyard. After all, if one is outside, one can eventually get to one’s car and depart the campus. As it was, we were potentially trapped.
My first three years of university I lived in a residence owned and run by nuns. (yeah, yeah - I got a single room. It was worth it)
The RCMP and fire department, having long since gotten sick of false alarms on campus charged a couple hundred bucks to come out to an alarm. Not wanting to have to pay for this, the Sisters disconnected our fire system alarm system from the network. To compensate for this (safety first, after all) they made all of the smoke/heat detectors insanely sensitive. (Smoking a cigarette in your room would set it off. Opening a bag of popcorn would set it off. Too many people in a room would set it off) As a result, we had 46 alarms in a 7 month period. It got to the point people just went and sat in the stairwell.
Real safe.
(this says nothing of the fire exits that were chained shut to prevent people from sneaking boys in)
Herein lies the problem:
If evacuation drills aren’t conducted, then people will do stupid things during a real emergency, possibly ending up dead.
If evacuation drills are conducted, people bitch because they’re inconvenienced.
Improperly maintained alarm systems contribute to the ‘screw it, it’s a false alarm’ mindset, until it is the real thing, and then when people are dead because they didn’t evacuate in a timely manner, people bitch.
When fire and inspection authorities want older alarm systems improved/replaced so they don’t cause false alarms, building owners bitch about the cost, which ends up being passed on the the tenants, who also bitch about the cost.
Some of the bitching can be fixed by not holding drills on days when there’s bad weather. Seriously, it’s a drill. There’s no reason you have to hold it during a blizzard or a monsoon. People will be more willing to go outside and wait if it’s a nice spring day…and you get your practice in. Plus, if it’s work, having to come back after and stay an hour later to make up for the drill gives people a major reason to ignore it/bitch about it.
Well, around here anyway, the busing staff need to get to work pretty darned early to scrape the ice/snow off buses, etc etc. If you have people showing up for work at (I don’t know four AM) in the winter to get on the road picking up kids, there are a lot of cases where you’d want to make that call by 11PM the night before, and not wait until people are actually showing up for work.
This is what I thought, too.
I was in one school when the fire alarm was set off, not as a planned drill. The rain was pissing down at the time. As a result, via a broken ankle, they discovered the planned evacuation route from one particular building was fine in dry weather, but in heavy rain involved walking across slippery mud. They would never have found this out in a planned drill, which would have been postponed if the weather had been like it was that day.
Of course, I’m not advocating having a drill in severe weather without proper planning and resources (which unfortunately probably aren’t available to most schools), but it’s dangerous to say that everything will always be just like it is on a summer day.
Any school system that does not plan for climate in an emergency situation is just jonesing for a lawsuit.
The city I was raised in? During deadly cold weather we went across to the county courthouse. The city I live in now? City buses are an active component of a fire call - it fact, two years ago, a city bus responded to a gas leak to take care of apartment resident until the leak was resolved.
Hilarity N. Suze, do you go to school board meetings? It’s ok if you say no - no one does. I just wanted to note that, one day, during a quarterly Captains Call when I was relatively new to the military (you mean you’re not supposed to TALK during a Captains Call?!), I casually brought up the idea that mustering next to the diesel fuel tanks during a fire drill might not be the best idea on the planet. Holy FUCK did things change fast. Now that I’m older and wiser I’d go to a school board meeting and ask them how much liability the school would have if even ONE child died of hypothermia because of their poor disaster planning and gently steer them towards city/county emergency management and/or the Red Cross and/or FEMA and/or Homeland Security. I’d start with Homeland Security, but I’m evil like that.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a fire drill take less than 30 minutes.
If you need to make sure the routes are safe in bad weather, there are better ways to do it.
I don’t go to school board meetings as a general rule, so not much chance of me complaining there. I do go to PTA meetings, though.
However, the letter explaining about the fire drills never made it home, so I still don’t know what their explanation might have been, and it doesn’t matter. If something was wrong with the equipment and there was no fire, surely it wouldn’t take 30 minutes to figure out that the school was NOT on fire so bring the kiddies back in, and then when it happened the second time they could say, another false alarm.
I’m betting that the letter contained some garbage about “when the fire alarm goes off we HAVE TO evacuate, no matter what.” Right. This is the same school system that refused to release my kid WHEN SCHOOL WAS OUT because we were under a “tornado watch.” First of all–he was in grade school at the time–I had walked over there. There may have been a tornado somewhere over Colorado, but it was certainly not threatening Denver, or the county, or the school. Second of all, I spent years in Oklahoma. These Colorado tornados don’t scare me. Not enough air to do much damage. I don’t think there’s ever been a fatality in Colorado because of a tornado. Eleven-degree weather with a wind chill, I wouldn’t be so sure.
What makes you so sure? Seems like it would take longer to declare a “non-fire” than a real fire.
A real blazing fire, you can see. A non-fire that is the result of someone pulling the alarm or a malfunction in the alarm requires the fire department to show up and the location searched thoroughly to make sure there is no fire. It could be some tiny fault somewhere. It could be an actual fire that is enclosed and not evident.
They’re not keeping your kid outside just to spite you. They’re following rules that were set in place to keep people safe.
What would you think if the fire department showed up, said “eh, no smoke billowing from the roof, let the kids back in before they freeze,” and 20 minutes later someone opened an oven in the cafeteria and the whole place blew up?
You’d be pitting the fire department for not taking the time to secure the building.
You need to call the school and have them send you a copy of the letter explaining their actions. Maybe this time ask that they send it in the mail to you.
They used to do that at my high school (before I went to high school). One year I think they called in about 10 of them. They all thought it was a great way to get the day off school. They stopped doing it when they found out that school would run an extra day into summer to make up for it.
Outside without coats in windy, subzero weather is not “safe.” We have this weather every now and then, so maybe they should alter their rules.
Can we say “lawsuit waiting to happen?” I’d have been on the phone to the fire department in a heart beat!
Holy crap! In New England of all places? I live in Eastern Washington, where there is no such thing as a “snow day”. I was still in school when we moved here from Western Washington, where an inch of snow would get school cancelled. Imagine my delight my first winter here when I woke up on a school day, looked out the window, and saw that 2 feet of snow had fallen overnight. Now imagine my dismay when Mom said, “Nope, school’s not cancelled.”
This area is so accustomed to and equipped for heavy snowfall that when it snows overnight, by the time most people get out of bed all of the major roads and most of the residential streets have been plowed and sanded, and the school buses are equipped with devices that, with the flip of a switch, will dump a metric buttload of sand in front of the wheels should an emergency stop be required.
Plus, we all know how to drive in the crap. With compact snow and ice on the road, and snow still falling heavily, everybody still drives at least 10 MPH over the speed limit.
One of the girls’ fathers was a fire marshall for a neighboring county.
Never did hear how that little talk turned out, however.
I remember a fire drill from high school that took place in the winter. We weren’t allowed coats, but even worse, one of the PE classes was in their swimming unit. I saw the whole class wet and huddled in their towels. I don’t remember if they had footwear on. I also don’t remember how cold it was–there was snow on the ground, but it could have been above freezing. I thought it was pretty crummy–they could have notified the PE teachers so the kids wouldn’t change or get wet. I don’t think that would have ruined the spirit of a fire drill.