Both horns and voice evac can fail to make people evacuate. Specially when people don’t actually see a fire (or other emergency), there is no punishment for not evacuating (like in school) and even the facility’s staff doesn’t care. See below for examples of all of the above.
In the case of Walmart, and disregarding code, I wonder if the alarm might’ve been more effective if the SpectrAlert Advances were set to continuous at maximum volume, and the strobes’ brightness was cranked up a bit (say at least to 75cd, if they are spaced for 15cd).
The case of the concert also highlights another problem, which is that with such loud noise and so many flashing lights and fireworks, both horns/speakers and strobes can go unnoticed. Maybe for places holding concerts it should be mandated that strobes be 185cd (wall)/177cd (ceiling), and be spaced tighter than usual for such brightness. As for volume, that problem is harder to solve, since technically code already requires the alarm to be 5-15db louder than ambient noise, which for a concert is around 120db, but currently manufactured fire alarm horns don’t go above 90-100db, and I don’t know if speakers can go much louder than that. Perhaps another solution would be to require all of the concert’s speakers and visual effects hardware to be powered by a circuit that is automatically disabled upon fire alarm.
That actually would be a better idea because then there would be no reason for anybody to stay if there was no visual or sound effects and having to listen to the annoying fire alarm.
My school has Edwards pre integrity’s in the 7th grade wing, integrity’s in the 8th grade wing and a 2903 with a genesis on it! The 6th grade wing has genesis
At my school, fire drills sound chaotic and almost scary
C building: Gentex Commander 2s set on 2.4Khz continuous(skips), pull stations :Fire Lite BG-8s (2 in each classroom) and one GE rebranded simplex T-Bar, detectors: 2 system sensor 2400s in hallway(Broken )
B ,F ,H ,A ,E ,D buildings: Wheelock HSRs (one wall mount in office)
G building and auditorium: Wheelock AS s and silent knight T bars (dual action)
E hallway: one Federal Signal Vibratone set on continuous and Federal Signal strobe mounted on it (skips) and wheelock AS(135 cd)
All other buildings do not have pull stations and have SD-55s
The panel is a Fire Lite MS-9200UDLS
All strobes are code 3
System has a delay(vibratone, AS, commanders, HSRs)
The portables in my middle school had System Sensor SpectrAlert Classics/L Series with Gamewell Centuries or EST 270-SPOs. Also, there were EST Integrities outside along with one SpectrAlert Advance.
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