Today, we had another false fire alarm. This is the seventh false alarm we have had so far this school year, and we started on August 28th.
Around 8:30 AM, I was in my first period when the alarm went off. We immediately went outside. We had to stand in the 12°F weather for around 15 minutes. At around 8:45 AM, we were given the all clear to come back inside.
The reason they have had so many false alarms is that it is a brand new building and they still have some areas under construction. Also, their Siemens XMS-S pull stations are incredibly easy to accidentally activate just by bumping them.
I am pretty sure that this false alarm was caused by construction dust triggering a smoke detector. I don’t think it was a pull station because they installed STI stoppers over almost all of the pull stations after the last false alarm.
We haven’t actually had any (successful) fire drills yet this year because of all of these false alarms.
Although these may seem like safety issues (and they probably are), this new building is still considerably safer than the old building. That building had no fire sprinklers or fire separations in the building whatsoever. They also had a pretty basic FA system with very minimal coverage.
Jeez…sounds like they need to start making use of the “disable point” function! (either that or temporarily cover the detectors (& of course make sure to not forget to remove said covers once the work is done)
Well that’s good at least, even if so far the new system has had several false alarms (though through no fault of the system itself: it’s literally doing what it’s supposed to do, outside of mistaking dust for smoke).
They have been covering some of the detectors near where they are working, but obviously they haven’t been doing a good enough job. They also have forgotten to take the covers off of the detectors in some areas of the school that have been done for a long time. At least the building is sprinklered and they will probably catch the issues over the summer during the annual inspection.
Damn, this sounds very similar to our situation 10 years ago! What are the rules on a 2-stage system?
At the time, my high school was putting on expansions and like yours, construction set it off regularly. My school pretty much decided to just deal with it. In the state I was in at the time, they only had to do 3 fire drills / year, and accidental activation of the system counts toward those. They pretty much considered these false alarms to be drills for both us and the fire department.