Thanks @FireAlarmTech9 for last year’s topic and letting me steal it. =]P
It’s time to begin a new school year (mine starts in a few weeks, in fact). So let’s start it off!
Talk about your disaster prevention drills that you have this school year - Fire drills, inclement weather drills, and lockdown drills to name a few. You can also post updates of your school’s system if there were any changes or inspections done there.
[b]Please remember - the point of disaster prevention drills is to practice what you would do if an actual emergency occurs. A few pointers for you and your classmates:[list]
[*][i]Take drills seriously and act as if they were real. [/b]Drills are practice opportunities so evacuations can be swift yet safe.[/i]
[*][i][b]What would you do if such an emergency were to strike at the school? In your classroom? [/b]For example, would you assist your friends in getting out, or make sure the way is clear of hazards before letting others know it’s safe to evacuate the room?[/i]
[*][i][b]Follow specific instructions from your school. [/b]Take note of certain announcements or signals used during emergencies.[/i]
[*][i][b]There is often little time between a warning and evacuation. This is why it's important to be ready to respond to any warning given.[/i][/b]
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Feel free to discuss emergency incidents that occur in your school too. REMEMBER: If an actual emergency occurs, remain calm and secure your personal safety. Follow instructions of the staff and take proper actions.
With that in mind, go ahead and update us on your drills and disaster prevention happenings!
I made this topic a “sticky” and downgraded the 2017-2018 to a standard topic. You’ll see this one in place of the older one now, but you should still be able to find the posts from 2017-2018 somewhere farther down in Fire Alarm General Discussion.
Really, you had to remind us teachers that summer is almost over?!?! Actually, I am ready to go back.
My state requires fire drills monthly. I think it is up to each district to come up with requirements for lockdown and tornado drills. We usually do one of each during each quarter.
As for announcing them, my school does not send an email or make an announcement stating “fire drill at 2:00 today” or “lockdown at 9:15” . However, if you happen to hear the plans for a drill, its no big deal.
Oh man, the fact that this is already posted makes me realize that summer went WAY too fast.
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I know right?
Hah, sorry.
Georgia requires monthly fire drills, which can only be substituted for a tornado drill in November and February. Security related drills are up to the district.
I believe that we’re going to start announcing when drills occur a few minutes before they start (that’s one major change happening). I’m not sure if they email the teachers for that.
Drill Day! We did all three major drills: Lockdown, Tornado, and Fire Evacuation in the same day. (10:13-10:49)
Lockdown: We hid in the corner of the room away from the window and door. There was only whisper and small talk going on; no one was really quiet and kids were on their phones. Apparently the blue wheelock strobes did flash (none in the classrooms), and the teacher thought the new Siemens SEH on the ceiling was one of those alarms. It never flashed.
Tornado: Everyone either went to the first floor lockers and did that kneeling thing or into the locker room and sat in the seats. It was very loud in the locker room because of how echoey it was, and we missed the first out of five announcements to go back to class so we can practice evacuating the school.
Fire: This is the only one y’all were waiting for. The Simplex system did in fact activate and not the new Siemens FireFinder system (SPEAKER STROBES ARE GETTING INSTALLED), so we got to smell that… no joke. The Simplex 9846s doing their thing made it smell like there was an actual fire going on, never noticed it the years prior. Anyways, I did hear a bit of TrueAlerts on the farthest end of the school doing code-3 since they’re on SmartSync, unlike the rest of the TrueAlerts and other NAs. Everyone in the halls were talking which really muffled the horns, (besides the carpet) so they weren’t very loud for me, didn’t cover my ears at all lol.
So yeah, if we have a false alarm frenzy like last year, I’ll report it here. Funny thing is, I realized the 9105s and 9846s were probably gonna go off instead of the SEHs (or SETs, idk what’s the difference) because they didn’t go off during the Tornado or Lockdown drills (they have ALERT lettering not FIRE lettering) If I do hear them, they’re probably being tested and the PA will tell us to stay in school (kids).
Alright guys, this next one happened at 1:30 to 2:00 today, I’m not sure if school starts late for you guys or you forgot about this topic but here we are today.
So it was 6th period English class, and we were beginning to do a debate on whether this poem called “Haiku for Him” should be in a school magazine (none of this is real). Your boy got administrator role so a lot of the argument and decisions fell on me and two other kids. The first kid who’s playing the student role speaks three words and the Simplex 9846s fire up in the hallways, the classroom 9105 strobe going with it. We all shout “Yay!” and walk to the exit. (We ended up waiting outside for about 20 minutes before we were allowed to go back in. Turns out the construction of the east building addition (which I was in) went wrong a little bit and set off some TrueAlarms.
That was cool. Also loud. I wonder how much of a game changer the Siemens MNS voice system will be once they finish up the system installation.
They aren’t frightening since there is remote strobes in the classrooms. However I can agree they’re really loud especially when you’re walking right next to one (I don’t cover my ears)
There was one 9838 in my high school that was excruciatingly loud and that was in a stairwell that was accessible from the freshman wing. Probably the most shocking part was that the Teen Center had a door that led directly to that stairwell and just on the otherside was that same 9838 that was mounted at head level. :shock:
Do most schools announce fire drill to students ahead of time or without any announcement?
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Since the school shootings earlier this year these announcements have become common at my high school, with exception of this month’s drills which was surprisingly unannounced (although when the fire department shows up, we gotta do it; our SRO and the Administrators (Principal, Vice Principal, and Athletic Director plus one of my English teachers who acts as second floor fire warden) always have a meeting right before our fire drills.
Here’s our most recent one (still gotta edit the one from August and post the compilation of five month’s worth of drills from ‘17-‘18, but I digress).
You’ll notice a few things (although I’ll fill you all in since you can’t really tell by looking at the floor):
Construction on the new building has officially started. Since we’re adding the new building onto the most recent (1995) addition; we ran out of $$$ for a brand new building entirely thanks to the district making the mistake of announcing how much the new building projects were gonna cost and having the public vote on it and it being approved before they did their homework to figure out the real price tag (they were apparently several millions of dollars off…whoops… :roll:), so long story short all exits on the west side are closed as construction fencing is already up and they started ripping out the parking lot last week and next week after this coming week is the official groundbreaking, so here’s the chaos:
We have ~250-300 kids exiting out two double doors (our main entrance down the same (200) hallway) instead of what we did in years’ past which was half would go out the main entrance and the other half would exit on the west side…of course everyone in the 200 hallway has to exit out the main entrance now since that side is closed. Our principal can be heard yelling at us in the video to be quick exiting and to hurry up.
Johnson Controls was here for this drill (and afterwards they went to the Middle School and checked on some newly-installed TrueAlerts that apparently went in over the summer according to a friend of mine that goes there; I never went to Junior High here (I lived in Indiana prior to 2015 so I’ve only been here at the high school), which means after nearly 10 years our fire alarm contract is back with Simplex, which makes me curious as to what type of system the new schools will have as they more than likely bidded on that project).
We’re a district on the border of two municipalities and serving three; typically one FD from one usually shows up since they’re the closest; well now both FD’s show up to our drills. Other than that everything seemed to be normal.
Here’s the video:
And no, I’m not dead…oh and go check out some of my other videos while you’re at it; not directly related to fire alarms but it might be interesting! I’ve been getting more into siren stuff till the winter starts (and tests for that stop during then obviously) and I’ve been lazy as far as fire alarm stuff has been concerned lately but don’t worry, I’m still very much interested in Alarms has I have been, and I have a lot of backlogged system tests from last year that I have yet to edit and upload… I’ll get around to it eventually…lol.
Oh yes. That is indeed one giant ass mess. I didn’t even have to see the video to know that it was. Reminds me of my high school modular building. Despite the fact that it has two exits and 9 classrooms, the WHOLE building has to evacuate out one exit.
False Fire Alarm: Tuesday, September 11th, 2018: about 12:20 PM
Well I was in gym class when all of a sudden the fire alarms sounded! I thought, “Well this isn’t good,” since we had already had our September fire drill last week. So we exited the building (none of us knew what was going on because we just had our fire drill on Wednesday of last week) and about 30 seconds later we were allowed to come back inside and the alarms had been silenced and turned off. We were told by some teachers that it was a false alarm and that was that. I didn’t get to record it because I was in gym class and my phone was in my locker. We think someone was messing around with stuff they weren’t supposed to or that somebody pulled it although I don’t believe it was intentional because I’ve been here for four years now and this was the first time something like that has happened here at my school.
What I thought was strange though is that the custodians turned off the alarm with the principal’s permission really quickly and not everyone had even evacuated yet once they made the announcement of the false alarm and we were allowed back inside. Normally when there’s a false alarm we have to stay outside until the fire department shows up and clears the building, but we had stood out there only for about 20 seconds before they said those of us that left could come back in (apparently those who chose not to evacuate heard an announcement over the PA that it was a false alarm), but I was already outside by that point so I never heard it).
Actually, I am ready to go back.
