Today, my high school attempted to have its first fire drill of the year and in the new building. To say the least, it did not work out well at all and was not a good showing for the FA system.
At around 9:40 AM, the principal made an announcement over the intercom system, stating that we would be having our first fire drill of the year shortly and telling teachers to go over the evacuation routes.
At around 10:00 AM, nothing had happened yet and everyone was confused what was going on because the period was going to end in 3 minutes. Around one minute later, the principal came back on the intercom telling everyone that they were having “technical difficulties” and to standby in the classrooms even though the bell was about to ring. Apparently, they had pulled a pull station and everything happened (fire doors closing, equipment shutdown, ect.), except they couldn’t get the speaker/strobes to do anything.
At around 10:10 AM, the principal came over the intercom one last time and said “We are still having technical difficulties with the alarm and cannot get it to sound. Please evacuate now.” Everyone went outside but the alarm never made a peep and none of the strobes flashed even once.
This is a new building and some parts are still under construction. The system has constantly been in trouble since day 1. I’m guessing that someone messed something up but the trouble was ignored because the staff probably just passed it off as something from the construction work.
At the end of the day when I was done with school and passing the annunciator, I was pleased to see that the system is now free of troubles. I think they fixed the issue. I know that the system was at least working properly on the first week of September because the alarm went off during the day on that Friday. Who knows at what point between then and now someone messed something up. The initiating devices have been pulling as normal the entire time, though.
For anyone that is interested, the FA system is a Siemens Cerberus PRO Modular with voice evac. The intercom system is an Adio Enhancement “EPIC” IP, server based system.