2010-11 Crisis Response Drills (Fire, Tornado,Lockdown,etc)

A continuation of the old thread, but for this current year! :smiley:

And I’ll be the first to reply.

My school had its first fire drill last Friday. The system is still Simplex 4040s doing 120bpm march time, and its unknown if the panel has been fixed or not. Last year, it was having trouble being reset.

This was the first drill I had where there was an alarm outside the door. Strangely, even with the door open, it wasn’t as loud as I thought it would be.

On Tuesday (9/14), we had our very first fire drill for this year during 11th period. There was an announcement prior to the fire drill, but due to the students talking, I couldn’t quite make out what was being said. The 7002T’s in the gym went off, and we evacuated towards the main lobby. As I was waking outside, I took a look at the annunciator and saw that the LCD display displayed no indication of the cause of the alarm (it showed the name of my school and other stuff just like it would say when the system is in a normal condition) and saw that the “Drill” LED was lit. Of course, outside, I heard the outdoor Integrity in Code 3 with its strobe being rendered inoperable (the strobe on that Integrity died either in late 2009, or in early 2010).

Just today (9/17) around 2:00 PM during the last period of the day during English class, we were about to watch a documentary, until the one of the U-MMT’s (the newer ones) started to go off in continuous horn. I went crazy trying to get my earmuffs out of my backpack (realizing how loud U-MMT’s are; I know they are loud) and put them on. Luckily the room we were in was very close to an exit. I was pretty much where I was from the fire drill that I had mentioned before this one, except closer to the doors near the outdoor Integrity.

We had our fire drill yesterday (9/16/10). We had an announcement in chemistry class that we were about to have a fire drill. Seconds after the announcement, the GX-90S’s started to go off in continuous, which was pretty loud. The 4903-9219’s in the hallways were VERY quiet, and might go unnoticed if it weren’t for the mini-horns in the classrooms. When we got outside, you could hear an MT-24-FR in code 3 horn. I tried to take a video, but the teacher confiscated the camera. Thank goodness I got it back at the end of class.

My school is having a fire drill tomorrow during second period. I don’t know the time, but i’m assuming it’s at 10:00.

My high school had its first fire drill two weeks ago. I found out about it 3 minutes before hand becase I was in the hall taking a test for freshmen (im the only one in my geometry class :expressionless: ) and I saw the AP coming down the hall way, stop abruptly, turn around, lift the cover on a stopper II (and it had a horn) and pull the pull station for no reason. Again, the system is the same on all of the buildings around here. EST gennises inside, wheelock MTs outside all on code 3.

Well, turns out we didn’t have the fire drill today because it was raining. But the rain date for the fire drill is September 30th, which is in 2 more days.

Drexel’s Race Street Residence Hall had its first drill of the year at 4:30 today, and it came with a bit of a surprise for the sophomores (including myself) who lived there last year and are living there again this year. For some reason, they decided to change the Notifier system’s voice evac recording from a slow whoop/voice message (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRpdH1uMBuU) to a continuous hi-lo tone with no voice message. Everyone I talked to outside said they were glad it got changed because they thought “talking fire alarms are creepy.” I’m thinking it might have something to do with what sounds are best for awakening sleeping college students. Maybe someone concluded that voice messages aren’t very good at waking up young adults? I wouldn’t be surprised if that had something to do with it, as I was the very first person out of the building (from the 8th floor out of 11) for both of the alarms that we had during sleeping hours last year. Have any of you heard similar criticism of voice evac?

Well, turns out we had the drill today, and it wasn’t really a surprise because my teacher had told us we were going to have one. It was during second period, around 10:20. Here’s the video:

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I would have thought the slow whoop would be better considering the frequency range. But I guess hi-lo does a good job too and is more annoying so that people WANT to get out of the building. BTW, can you maybe get a clip of it? I’ve never heard hi-lo from a Notifier system before.

I was told that the Fine Arts building at Massasoit College had its alarm system tested today (might’ve had the sprinkler company involved as well or something). Good thing my brother didn’t have classes after 1 PM! (I believe that is when they started)

We had a fire drill yesterday, much like the one in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN0l0i_WC2o video. I overheard somebody on the admin’s radio saying that the total drill time was 6 minutes and 54 seconds.

Today (October 8th), we had a fire drill during Chemistry 2nd period. First off, unlike classrooms I’ve been in for science for the last 2 years, there is no alarm in the room. The door was closed and I could barely hear the 7002T (which barely skips/flashes and sounds like a -9219) went off. I heard a SpectrAlert classic horn/strobe going off in code 3 from the room across from us (no, it’s not the same classroom I’ve been in for Biology last year, it’s in different room where I discovered upon taking a quiz in that room where I won’t be distracted), and in addition to the SpectrAlert, I also heard the Integrity horn/strobes from 2 rooms we passed by as we evacuated. As we were closer to the exit, the 7002T in that area sounded kind of bad, and I barely heard the Genesis from the room that was next to that 7002T. This seems to be one of the most interesting fire drills I have experienced.

The funniest thing just happened. I was just catching up on the Fire Alarm Video thread. As I was finishing up one of the videos, I realized I could still hear an alarm. Ironically, it turns out that the campus was holding fire drills for all of the dorms (I had heard some alarms earlier from other dorms). We were outside for about 20 minutes. The fun part was when I was trying to open the emergency exit and it had a 15 second delay.

I see Dan started the thread for this year…

So far, we have had our Medical Drills on 8/20 and 9/21.
Fire Drills were on 8/31 and 9/28. Our next fire drill is approaching with in the next few days.

I want to quickly recap last year’s drills, since I wasn’t posting for a huge chunk of the year:
Fire: 8/25, 9/28, 10/21 (before classes began–false), 10/30*, 11/7* (one week after 10/30), 12/4* (false alarm), 1/27, 3/26* and 4/22
Med: Various times.
Tornado: 3/9
Lock Down: 2/10 and 2/25
*= Took place in the morning. Most drills are afternoon drills.

what is a medical drill?

They assemble all first aide personnel at random spots at random times to make them respond to a medical emergency where 911 might need to be called or CPR preformed. We do these usually 2x per quarter. Last year, we did them like once a week for the first month when they started it.

The alarms went off today during my Microsoft class. I got in at 4:00 and the alarms went off about 5 minutes into the class. All the Truealerts started going off and the entire main building was evacuated. The FD was nice and prompt, the station for that section of the city was only a few blocks away, so the event only lasted about 10 mins. before we all went back in. I’m now a sophomore at this college and this is the first time the alarms have ever been activated (at least when I was there).

Fire Drill yesterday around 9:55ish. This was actually a fast drill. Were outside for about 12 minutes. Our FDs are usually 20 minutes.

20 minutes for a fire drill? That seems like an awful long time. In grade school, fire drills were no longer than 5 minutes, in college no longer than 10, and even false alarms in college were no longer than 15 minutes.