Now that the school year is (unfortunately :() coming to a beginning, I figured it’d be a good idea to start a fire drill thread to discuss related occurrences for this year.
I found out my college mandates fire drills once a month in residence halls to comply with state and local fire regulations. Add in the likelihood of false alarms will happen with burnt food, etc. and that will add up to probably many interesting and possibly embarrassing stories. Hopefully, I’m not taking a shower when they decide to conduct a drill! :lol: But that may be inevitable. I’m not so sure about fire drills in the lecture halls and classroom buildings themselves though. It’s probably unlikely unless there’s an emergency or false alarm. We’ll see as time goes forward!
My middle school didn’t use the showers when I was in the 7th grade, they were used for storage. At the end of the 7th grade, they were cleared out so people playing sports could shower in them. Since they haven’t been used in years prior, whenever a student decided to use them then during gym class, a lot of cockroaches ran out of the drains in the locker room, and I mean A LOT. I heard they covered the entire floor in the guys’ and girls’ locker room.
I wouldn’t think it is pleasant at all! I’ve heard more than one horror story about it from different people. I don’t want to trudge down 5 flights of stairs in nothing but a towel. :lol:
Reminds me back when we used our Junior High showers as a storage room. One time they had to inspect the sprinklers in our shower area and they broke a sprinkler head and as soon as the water started going down the drains, cockroaches just started going everywhere and the shut down the locker room that day. Needless to say, I was happy about having no P.E.
I go back to school September 4th, but in the 3 years of being at the college, I was only caught in a fire alarm once. I’m hoping I can be caught in more fire alarms soon.
Depends! Dorms are required to hold fire drills with the number of drills varying by proper authorities. If its a commuter school like I ended up going to this past year, the classroom buildings never held fire drills. I only heard the alarms in the main classroom building once, and we never got a chance to get outside before they shut the alarms off because it was a mishap due to renovations. Some college’s require fire drills for classroom buildings but the only college I know of that does that is weatherdan’s.
Not exactly a school, but today downtown I passed by a building with its fire alarms sounding! (It was a mix of unsynced Wheelock NS and Edwards Integrity horn/strobes on Code-3, system was a small conventional Notifier panel of some sort.) No one was evacuating (except for a few people), and there were no fire trucks or a fire alarm service company’s vehicle around, so I wound up having to call 9-1-1 to report the fire alarm, because apparently this was a “local” system that doesn’t contact the fire department when set off. They said I did the right thing, though
On my first day (September 2nd) there was a malfunction with the cafeteria wiring and they went off and the fire department came! It was at the end of the day and screwed up the schedule tho. Then we had another false alarm while they were trying to fix the alarm on day two when day 2s fire drill was cancelled. It was funny how it happened though.
Thats really nasty! All the schools here in my city have showers, the elementary schools never use them anymore. The high schools, however, rarely do. When I was in high school doing gym, there was only like a few people who took showers, and just to cool off. The only showers that were used were the ones in the basement, where the football changerooms are.
We had our first fire drill at the dorm this evening! It caught me off guard because I had my door open and a U-MMT right outside it. So, the code-3 starts blaring and I have no idea what’s going on for a good few seconds. But it was all good, I now know more about the fire alarm systems in my hall.
So, they’re synchronized in code-3 and the rooms DO have sounders in their smoke detector. The good news with that is there’s about a 10 second delay between the alarms in the hall and the sounders in the room going off. They sound very much like the U-MMT’s but I don’t think they’re quite as loud. The U-HNH? (Is that an actual Siemens model number?) outside is set on continuous. I found out the panel (at least in my group of buildings) are all networked. The annunciator in our lobby was showing an alarm condition, even though they went on to the next building in their routine and started their fire drills. I had a hunch that this was the case when I saw that most of the buildings in my cluster were showing a trouble condition at the beginning of the school year. They also don’t do a reset at the annunciator. I’m pretty sure they do it at a remote location, and I’m intrigued as to whether or not they activate the alarms the same way since there’s Stopper covers over all the pull stations.
Anyways, I took a few short clips, one of the front of my building, and another longer clip of the hall next to mine having them. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to figure out how to load them tonight! I’ll get them up when I can!
Yesterday we had our first fire drill of the year. It was at 10:00 AM when we were having our school pics taken.
We heard it in advance when the teachers told the cameraman so it was not completely unexpected.
Yesterday we had a fire drill. It took place at about 10:05 AM, during Social Studies (Which is irrelevant, considering we take all our core subjects in our homerooms). We were in a portable classroom, so the 10 inch bell right outside our classroom door was fairly quiet.
They have been doing construction outside the portables for the past 4 weeks, so we were unsure if the rear exits were safe to use. Therefore, we used the nearest hallway exit. The signals do not seem synchronized, but the 10 inch and 6 inch bells produce a perfect harmony. The school has a Simplex 4100U system set to Code 3.
After about 4 minutes, we all kind of began walking back through the north entrance, which was odd, considering the exterior 10 inch bell was still ringing. Apparently, at this school, the admins will tell you after you evacuate if it is a drill or not, and if it is, once you have verified that your entire class has evacuated and is accounted for, you can go back in. As we walked past the annunciator, the panel was silenced, but had not yet been acknowledged. They reset the panel a few seconds later.
In total, the drill lasted for 5 minutes. It took us approximately 1 minute 30 seconds to evacuate and line up. No one panicked; everyone was relatively quiet and walking. I think the first drill of the year went pretty well! 1 down, 9 to go!!!
On Friday, my school had a Fire Drill. (The alarms are mostly Space Age VA4s, and there are 4 Integrities in the school) The VA4s at my school are out of sync and they have completely different pitches from each other! :?: The HA24D horns were hurting my ears, but they were not too loud for some reason. (In elementry school, they had U-MHU-MCS horn/strobes. They were as loud has heck!) The reason why they are on Continuous is probably because they would be out of sync when set to code-3 or march time.
Our schools almost finished 1 per month. Usually on a Friday so we have fire drill Friday!
We have indoors Simplex 4903-9219’s On one building we have a waterproof gentex commander 2. Al the other out doors we have Wheelock MTWP-75-FR’s. All of them are on code 3. Then on one side of the cafeteria we have a vibrating bell on code 3. Our panel is a Simplex 4100. The pulls are 4099-9001’s with Stopper II’s. They scare the crap out of you when it first goes off. Now the Admins let me pull the pull station and reset the system. It’s really cool. They say next year (The year Im gone D:) they are replacing the inside ones with Simplex 4903-9426 TrueAlerts. I will be sad to see them go. But other than that They haven’t been the worst. 6th grade they were 7th I got used to them somewhat. Now they really don’t bother me. (Except when it first goes off XD)
TrueAlerts are relatively loud. Most of my elementary school career was full of them and not matter how many times they tested them, I never got used to them going off.
