Not yet, but being they’ve tampered with other things on the system, it shouldn’t be long and I will for sure update if it does happen.
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My school was built in 2022 and has 1 pull station in the gym. It does not have any sort of covering so the fire alarm went off a few times after a basketballs kept hitting it.
Yeah that was just dumb on the part of the designers. Did they eventually add a protective cover to the manual station in the gym?
My gym is the same way. There used to be two Simplex 4251-20s, but they got destroyed. They were replaced by Edwards 270-SPOs which are still there. The only protected life safety equipment in the gym are the exit signs.
I’m really hoping that’s the case because that would have EVERYONE evacuate the school over the one thing that got pushed in the gym. I’m not even sure if it’s a held-in duct detector or it’s just an instant push duct detector but I still think it’s a held-in one because it’s a really poor design choice 
Just as I thought it supposedly has to be held for a few seconds in order to activate the detector just as a key switch would be according to EdwardsFan. Still just asking for vandals/tamperers though.
The IBC gives the AHJ the authority to require protective covers installed over pull stations subject to malicious activity or physical damage, but the requirement (IBC Section 907.4.2.5 for those of you keeping score at home) is not absolute, and it doesn’t mean that the AHJ can’t look at the metal pull stations that the broken plastic ones replaced and say “Yeah that’s good enough”.
Right wrong or indifferent, not against code. At least, not necessarily.
Hmm, that’s interesting. You’d think they would require protection where pulls are at risk of damage to be covered, but it makes sense that they would think they wouldn’t need to be covered due to being metal.
That to me doesn’t make sense since it really should consider if the station can be easily actuated by anything hitting it rather than the material it’s made out of: sure a metal pull station will withstand impacts better than a plastic one, but that won’t do anyone any good if it can still be accidentally activated as easily as a plastic pull station.
Those 270 pulls are pretty fiddly to activate with anything other than a hooked index finger. Pretty tricky to activate it any other way. A dodgeball whacking it would probably not even make a dent in it.
Is there risk of damage? Sure. Is the likelihood all that high? I don’t know. Maybe not enough to warrant the AHJ requiring pull station covers.
But I see uncovered pull stations all the time in places like repair shops, garages, aircraft hangars… Places where it’d make far more sense to install a cover. But if the AHJ doesn’t require them, why go through the extra expense to put them all in there?
Code doesn’t require it. Code lets the AHJ require it.
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True, but not every system’s stations are 270-series ones of course: might as well take every variable into account.
This is exactly why someday something tragic will happen all because an AHJ thought something was acceptable when it fact it was dangerously not up to code & then the code makers will be sorry that they even let AHJs have any authority to begin with (but of course it’ll be too late by then).
I know I’m bumping this topic a little late, but I just want to give more detail about the middle school. The gym has clocks and exit signs with covers, but the fire alarms apparently don’t matter to them. There is a cracked strobe on 2 of the alarms in the auxiliary gym, and the pull station has had a crack in it for a year now, and the school district still hasn’t done anything about it. I don’t know how long it will take them to buy a few extra cages for the fire alarms. All of this is happening while one of the elementary schools puts covers on random spots that don’t have nearly as much danger of causing a false alarm.
Sheesh…sure hope they get/come around to actually giving a crap sooner or later! (lest they might find themselves dealing with all sorts of stuff after a false alarm, system failure, or failed inspection)