You’re in the hallway of your apartment building and thru an apt door you hear a smoke/gas-detector alarm beep-beeping.
You wait a minute or so to see if the alarm stops. It continues.
So you knock on the apt door and say “Hey, it’s Joe from apt #5–I heard the alarm–want to be sure everything’s OK”–but no response. You knock again and say, “If you can hear me, say something–let me know everything is OK–otherwise I’ll have to notify the manager about a possible emergency”–but no response.
So you try to notify the manager but he’s not available.
So I guess you’d call 911? If they respond, what would they do? Break down the door?
Absolutely call 911. Time is of the essence here, and it could well be a matter of life and death.
In fact, I would be dialing 911 after the first knock without an immediate response. And upon hearing the alarm in the first place I would NOT wait a minute or so to see if the alarm stops, but would knock loudly on the door immediately.
I had a loosely similar situation once. I could near the shower running in an adjacent apartment, through the wall. At first, I paid no attention, and didn’t really even notice it.
A few hours later, the shower was still running. A few hours later (after midnight now) it was still running. At some point, I really noticed that the shower had been running for hours.
Should I have called . . . somebody?
Eventually, I did. This was some years ago, so I don’t remember the exact details. I think I called the emergency 24/7 maintenance number, only to get a answering service. Somehow I convinced them to put the call through to a real maintenance (or security) person immediately.
Eventually a security person came out. This was about 4 or 5 in the morning by now. Due to the layout of this building, there were possibly 6 or 7 adjoining apartments it could be. I suggested, and the security guy agreed, that he should go knocking on doors.
IIRC, nothing came of it, except one tenant who was fighting pissed over being woken up. We had to de-escalate and convince him to go back into his apartment.
I know that the “call 911” answer seems to be the obvious one but consider my building. It is new, less than two years old. But almost without fail, whenever I cook anything that emits any kind of smoke at all, the smoke alarm goes off. There is no manual off switch so one just keeps all the windows open, all bathroom fans on, and keep waving towels at the smoke alarm up on the ten foot ceiling. It finally goes off.
I hear my neighbors (and their neighbors) alarms going off in a similar fashion. No way would I want anyone to call 911.
Sure, but in these circumstances you’d answer the door.
In the OP’s circumstances - alarm goes off, nobody responds to loud knocking on the door - the probability of a genuine emergency is far higher. Either someone is home and unconscious, or they are not home in which case it wasn’t cooking that set off the alarm.
A few years ago, a friend was getting ready for work, feeding the kid breakfast while her husband showered. A neighbor called and said, “hey, are you aware there’s smoke billowing out of your garage”.
They just barely got out of the house, which was a total loss.
(The case is still in court. They purchased a new car the day before the fire and the car was the source.)
This happened to me last year (in my neighbour’s house, not an apartment, but our houses are attached). Smoke alarm going off for some time, no answer from neighbour when we knocked. We called the emergency services - 3 fire engines came. Neighbour had put something in the oven, then taken some sleeping pills and fallen asleep.
That’s what I thought as well. In my apartment, I’m required to have one smoke detector in each room (excluding the bathroom), as well as one carbon monoxide detector in the apartment. I also have a natural gas detector and radon detector in the bedroom which is next to the basement.
My last big-tower apartment had some sort of multi-tier alarm system. It could go off in the apartment, the entire floor, multiple floors, or the entire building. We definitely set off the in-apartment one searing steak. But it didn’t go beyond that. Anyone familiar with this sort of system? I’m curious about how it works.
FYI, keep an electric fan near the alarm and when you cook point it at the smoke alarm and run it on high. We have a super sensitive alarm and this works for us.
I can hear a few smoke detectors from other apartments in mine. If it’s from my one neighbor I ignore it because it goes off every damned time they try to cook. Mostly they don’t; they mainly live off TV dinners. But pull out a pan and boom! Smoke alarm goes off. They admitted it once cheerfully.
For the others I wait to hear what’s going on - if it doesn’t turn off I’ll go investigate
A few of my neighbors are always burning shit. Besides the battery-operated smoke detectors, the building also has hard wired ones. If the guy upstairs burns his dinner, the alarms in the entire building go off.
This means they will go off every minute or so while they try to clear their kitchen of the smoke.
When the hard-wired ones go off, I don’t worry too much. BUT–if my battery-operated one goes off, I worry.
I have a natural gas detector with has a 9V battery for back-up. The bad thing is, if I lose power for more than a few hours, it drains the 9V battery, and then it starts squealing.
How much detail do you want? Until my retirement about three weeks ago, I was the lead technician at the largest fire alarm company in my area. One of our accounts is the City Housing Authority that operates a dozen or so fourteen story apartment buildings.
The smoke detector in your apartment is a single station detector that is not tied in to the building fire alarm. Its task to to notify you, as the person in the occupied space, that there is a fire in your unit.
Any building wide fire alarm input will transmit a signal to a monitoring station and they will call the fire department.
Your building is covered by fire sprinklers. There is a sprinkler head in each room that will open when it reaches its rated temperature (usually 165f or 74c) and start spraying water on the affected area. This water flow will trip a switch at the sprinkler riser that will initiate the building wide fire alarm to warn the whole building via the speakers and strobes in the hallways.
Note: It is only in movies that operating a fire alarm manual pull station will turn on every sprinkler head in the building.
In the hallway outside of your apartment there are sprinkler heads, smoke detectors, notification horns and strobes and a manual pull station at each exit from your floor. These smoke detectors, sprinkler heads and pull stations, in the common areas, will initiate the building wide fire alarm. At this time the fire doors that are usually held open will close.
If your building is seventy five feet or more tall it is considered a high rise. In this case the notification is different. The floor where the fire was detected and the floors directly above and below that floor will receive the evacuation notification instructing these residents to evacuate the building immediately and noting that the residents not use the elevators*. The rest of the building will receive the alert notification instructing these residents that there is an emergency in the building and that they should stand by for further instructions.
*If the smoke detector that detects the fire is in an elevator lobby the fire alarm system will capture the elevator, sending it down to the main floor, opening the doors and powering it down. This is to allow the firefighters access to the elevator in fire mode to fight the fire. This only is done by the specific smoke detectors in the elevator lobbies. The rest of the alarm system has no effect on the elevators.
However, a building fire can damage the elevators. The last place you want to be in a building fire is in an elevator. The shaft is a natural chimney for the smoke. If the smoke inhalation does not kill you, a loss of power to the building, very common in fire conditions, will shut the elevator off, trapping you inside a burning building.
If the smoke detectors are going off when people are cooking they need to be replaced with the proper detectors. Ionization detectors do not detect visible smoke. They are triggered by the non visible particles of combustion. The lovely smell of frying bacon are actually the non visible particles of combustion given off by the cooking process.
If all you have in your living space are ionization detectors a cigarette dropped down in between couch cushions just before you go to bed will kill you before the ionization detector sound, if it ever does.