Well, we are at the beginning of a new school year here. I will not know whether I am coming or going this year! It’s going to be a busy year working at more than one school, but that increases my odds for fire drills.
We already had our evacuation drill at my work near school in February, it was mandatory since we moved into a new building. We are apparently doing it yearly as required by the University of California.
As a side note, I know that most of the dorm fire/evacuation drills happen in the later part of September/early part of October, and there is only one per year. Not sure about class buildings, but I’m pretty sure they’re annually planned as well.
My other work does not have a fire alarm system, and my dad only knows of one time a couple years ago when they did an evacuation in his building. They had failed miserably, since there was no fire alarm system, and it was basically someone walking around with a portable air horn.
I do not know if I will be living in an apartment or private house next year, so it’s unknown as to any drill situations with that. In my off-campus apartment last year we didn’t have a fire/evacuation drill, however many cooking incidents that did arise turned into pseudo-evacuation drills. :lol:
I know several buildings like that. I imagine it would be quite difficult to evacuate should the need arise. These days a fire alarm system is like a basic building necessity, I’d like to know why these buildings were given the okay to not have an alarm system installed. And for the record, no, there’s no sprinklers in them either.
Yeah it was probably because they were grandfathered under code. The buildings where there is manufacturing of products, and especially buildings that contain flammable chemicals, those have fire alarm systems in them. Our building is sprinklered and it only houses administrative staff along with their assistants. No manufacturing, assembly, shipping/receiving, goes on at our building.
Today, we had a fire drill at 7:15 A.M. You can read about my new school’s system here: http://community.schuminweb.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=112&p=45145
As an add-on to my work, we had a horn/strobe test turn into a fire drill last Thursday, since the alarm company was there to reset the system. They even returned to replace a defective AS, and had to do another test (no evacuation needed this time around).
I can see why. Usually nowadays if I see a building with no fire alarm system, it’s some kind of store or fast food restaurant. I know the McDonald’s built near my college initially had NO fire alarm system, but a few months back they went and installed an addressable Fire-Lite system throughout the building. I imagine back in the 1980s, it was OK for small buildings like those to have no alarm system, but today they’ve become a mandatory requirement, and I guess this McDonald’s wanted to meet up with the current codes.
I, too, know some places without an internal fire alarm system, such as the Dollar General in Oscoda, MI, and most of the Somerset Collection in Troy, MI (although there may be a voice-evac system through speakers), to name a couple. I strongly agree that having such a system and plan for a safe evacuation should be in place for the safety of the store’s employees and customers.
In regards to smaller, specialty stores, perhaps there should be some smoke detectors in place, and not a whole lot of obstruction in case people need to get out in an emergency (such as an antique store). Sprinklers in these kinds of places could really help prevent the spread of fire, especially in a lot of decade-old buildings I have been to in downtown areas.
Well with school starting tomorrow, I hope to see if my school could of replaced the old Edwards system. As well as seeing some upcoming fire and lockdown drills.
My school had one tornado drill at 7:24 this morning, and four of its six required fire drills at 8:31. 9:41, 12:19, and 1:22 throughout the day. Each one lasted for four minutes.
Four in one DAY? The most my school did was two in one day.
Our state mandates that six to eight fire drills must be conducted during a full school year. Schools across my district tend to do drills like this, with lower and upper elementary schools having three in one specific week, middle schools having between two to five fire drills one day (and two of our required tornado drills another day), with the high schools having four in one day. The same thing has been done the last two years I have been there.
I am glad that we do one a month. There have been a couple of times where the fire alarm rang twice in one day, but that’s because there were either issues with the system or someone pulled it more than once. And, we have had 2 in a month, one drill and one false.
We did our August one about 3 weeks ago at 10:45.
Yeah, my MS/HS liked to do 2 in one day sometimes and in my senior year, we had 5 in one week (one each day).
We had our first fire drill of the year today. They set off the alarms at 8:20, which I thoughr it was gonna be at 9. I knew about rhe drill beforehand, and my vice prinxipal made it obvious when he talked about fire saftey on the morning announcements. The old Efwards system is still installed, and i got a video with my new phone, which surprisingly has reallt good quality.
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Today, the fire alarms unexpectedly went off at 10:10 this morning. It wasn’t a fire drill, but instead a real alarm! Apparently, they recently installed a new swamp cooler, and the wiring somehow burnt, causing smoke, therefore causing the alarm. We had to wait outside for 55 minutes, but luckily, it was really nice out today 
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Today, we had a fire drill at school that happened this morning. The alarms were SpectrAlert Advance Horn/Strobes set to Code-3, but there were two problems. The horn/strobe by the main office didn’t function properly like it was suppose to. Also the smoke detector after the alarm went off got knocked off the ceiling by some kids horsing around which was a System Sensor i3 and was later fixed. The Secretary of the school had to call our local Koorsen Fire and Security company to tell them that the smoke detector was accidentally knocked off by the ceiling in the boy’s bathroom and it was fixed now.
The problem with the horn/strobe:
The SpectrAlert Advance Horn/strobe wasn’t chirping in code-3. It was like chirping a bit like a bird singing, it sometimes did chirp like the starting of the horn sounding and the strobe flashed a bit but didn’t flash continuously. Maybe it was a problem with the Notification Appliance Circuit. It happened before this fire drill. Also I got to be inside when it went off!
Keypad:
The keypad showed ZONES IN CHECK and then CHECK 064 2ND FLOOR SMOKE when the smoke was still out of it’s base.
We had a fire drill 2 days ago. Nothing special to tell. At my new school, they don’t even last 10 minutes. So nice!
My school had its first lockdown drill of the year at 9:39 this morning. Unlike most drills where we would all seek protective shelter (under a table, for example), the teachers continued to teach while the building was swept with K-9 units. Because of the size of the school, the drill lasted for around 40 minutes.
We had our second fire drill today during 6 period at 1:40 pm. I was in my math class on the third floor, so alot of walking. It was a pretty unexpected fire drill for me, they usually put the dates of the fire drills on the weekly calendar, but they didnt. They had one listed for October 4, but for some reason it never happened. Nothing too new about the FA system, still with the Edwards 10" single stroke Adaptabels. I hardly doubt this system’s getting replaced anytime soon. Here are the videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4IDCrJdjS0 -part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLAEdgOcv5A -part 2
So all that remains now is the lockdown drill.