So today was an interesting day…
Tomorrow is my high school’s homecoming dance. (No, I’m not going lol. Don’t have a date) This week, the school’s halls have been decorated beautifully, and we’ve been doing different things during the week. Today, all the periods were shortened about 10 minutes because we had an assembly at the end of the day.
However, things did not go as planned. I was in the last period of the day (World Civilizations) in a classroom in one of the older halls of the school. Just a usual day in class, just a shortened period. After a while, the announcement came over the PA dismissing the Health and Drivers Ed halls to the assembly. They said to stand by and wait for other halls to be called. About 5 seconds after the announcement, I suddenly heard the 2901-9838 horns in the hall go off. Since we had the door closed, we could barely hear them, and we had to actually tell the teacher we heard the fire alarm.
I left the classroom, and followed everyone towards the football field to meet my 7th period fire drill teacher. I met my class at the 30 North mark on the football field. It was chaotic. After all, we were evacuating 3,000 occupants. As I guessed, it took a very long time. I would say the whole ordeal took around half an hour, taking a significant chunk of time from the assembly.
So why did the fire alarm go off? It was not a fire drill. The first rumor was that someone pulled one of the pull stations. But later, I heard from a teacher that a fog machine tripped a smoke detector in the gym. I pretty much confirmed that too. The fire department responded (meaning it wasn’t a drill), and after the assembly, I realized all the magnetic door holders had released, so I decided to prop back open some of them. So what it really comes down to is the fact that they failed to disable the detector in that zone.
The show still went on right afterwards though, but about half an hour was cut off. I really wish they would have just pressed those few buttons before blowing off a fog machine. By the way, there was no fog machine at all when I went to assembly.
FYI, the system there is a Simplex 4100 with 4903 TrueAlert horn/strobes in the new part of building with 2099 pulls, and 2901-9838 horns with 4903-9101 strobe plates and 4251-20 pulls. System is on continuous, as of all the other schools I have gone to in the district.