My group of residence halls were having fire drills conducted yesterday, but before they got to my dorm there was a major problem. From what I understand and witnessed yesterday from my room, a dorm nearby was having a fire drill and it seemed pretty typical. The alarms for that dorm were shut off and they moved to the next dorm. About 30 seconds later, the fire alarm systems in both the previous dorm and the subsequent dorm went into alarm at the same time. Eventually both were reset (at the same time) and after awhile of no fire alarms going off in my dorm I figured it was just an issue with those two buildings and it wasn’t an actual fire drill.
My RA told us that they were conducting fire drills yesterday and that there was a major glitch with those two buildings so they cancelled the rest of the drills for the day and possibly the month as they figure out why one building triggered another buildings system. Being the alarm nerd I am, I’m trying to figure out what happened… any ideas? Could it have been a network issue?
Are the panels wired together; to trigger each other? They used to do that at an elementary school I visited once. When the activated a drill (or manual evac) from the panel, it would activate all of the building’s NAC’s not any of the other panels. But if you pulled a pull station from that same building, the panel would go into alarm, and after about 3 seconds send a signal to the next building’s FACP and send it into alarm. (I think it used relays to do this, I can’t remember because this system was removed before the school was torn down)
They wouldn’t need to be connected together though since they are 2 separate buildings. They have no need to set off another building. My best guess is that they are all networked together since 95% of the buildings on campus have Siemens systems. Something must have went wrong and initiated more than one node when it should have only activated the panel in one hall.
Large college campuses where all the fire systems are the same are often networked to a central control in a security office. These networks are not designed to dump a whole campus if there’s an alarm in one building, but they are to give the safety and security officers a central point of notification for incoming fire alarms from the various buildings.
It is possible the programming got messed up, though. It could also be the proximity of the two buildings – If you have two buildings that are super close to each other they might be programmed to alarm both buildings because of exposure… like if you have a fire on the side of one building that is really close to the other building it could spread to the other building.
There’s a school that we do at work which is a campus of buildings connected by surface tunnels (hallways essentially) and they have a 7 node Simplex system (9 buildings and some buildings share panels) where an alarm in any of the buildings will dump the whole campus.