Today I had a fire drill, the system is half EST4, and half NFS2-640. This drill was a disaster. The systems are not synchronized (Important for later!), however the entire building will be upgraded to the EST4 over the summer. If you want to see more about this system, and my future high school’s system, here is the link: What alarm do you have at work/school - #1358 by NOTIFIER. During this drill, I was inside a new classroom, which has the EST system. The N/A’s are EST LED speaker strobes marked “ALERT”. The tone played is “Three Pulse Horn” along with a custom message IMG_9096.mov - Google Drive (video of the message). I personally think that they did a horrible job with this message, and the install in general. The message played says “Attention, attention, a fire alarm has been reported in the building. cease all operations and leave the building by way of marked exits only. Do not re-enter the building unless given permission to do so.” This message caused confusion among staff and students as they did not know what “marked exits” were, and the system was extremely quiet as it activated. A lot of the strobes in the hallways are blocked by lights, and the message quality is poor. You can’t really make out “cease” in “cease all operations” so it just sounds like “attention, attention, a fire alarm has been reported in the building. all operations and leave the building…” The strobes being unsynchronized was a major issue during this drill, as I believe that a teacher with photosensitive epilepsy had a seizure during this drill. The school released a notice saying “[teacher’s name] had minor medical complications during the routine fire drill today, caused by unsynchronized fire alarm strobes across our two fire alarm systems. As you know, we are renovating our school, and part of this renovation is upgrading the fire alarm system to better protect our students and staff. Due to the upgrade, half of the building’s fire alarm strobes are not synchronized with the other half of the building. We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused, and are taking measures to fix this situation, and ensure that it does not happen again.” I have no clue what they are going to do to fix this, but this definitely needs to be fixed, as in an emergency, it could be very dangerous if someone had a seizure
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