At some of the schools I’ve gone to, there were some classrooms with a loud fire alarm NA where the teacher put tape over the holes on the NA to reduce the noise. Is this legal? Is it considered tampering with a fire alarm?
It’s also common for special needs wings of schools to have tape over the fire alarm NAs because lots of the students in those wings are afraid of the fire alarm.
Omg this is so common. My local Costco has them covered in the meat department. (Spectralert Advances) my local Pei Wei has tape over the UMMT’s. An apartment building where my boyfriend lives has them taped over in the hallways (probably done by residents. There’s lots of cranky old men) and I’ve seen it in many many other places. In my opinion, that should be against code because the loudness met UL standards and if they can’t hear the alarm or something, they are Sh*t out of luck. Like for reals, if you want quieter alarms ask for chime strobes to be installed or something else. Don’t do something to satisfy you that can potentially put others In Danger. And how often are these gonna be activated? If it bugs you that much, just get earplugs or leave.
Well, I’m almost certain that this is the answer:
Special needs classrooms don’t always have them covered; I had an IEP when I was in Kindergraten and First Grade and I got to experience a fire drill. Guess the installers thought we wouldn’t be able to hear the EHS-DL1’s in the hallways, so they put a nice loud 7002T in there for us…that school was built in 1991 so hence the non ADA devices, but I remember it scaring me. I never had to go back to the room because soon after I didn’t need my IEP anymore, but I remember it being loud. But I was sensitive to loud noises for some reason back then, not to mention I was like 5 or 6 so I didn’t know how loud things really were.
I have never seen this done in any of my schools and of all of them I think that my high school would have been the one to most likely do this. In my high school, there were alarms almost EVERYWHERE that wasn’t a large classroom or a bathroom. The former assessment center which was then used as a special education class had a 2DCD+AV32 combo that was so loud it made the computer screens in there stripe up vertically. I was in there two times when it went off and on the second time I was at the other end of the room and it was STILL loud. Also there was another 2DCD+AV32 combo in that area that was so loud you could hear it coming down the stairs. I wonder if it is better not since they were replaced with Siemens U-MMTs?
Then we have the 9838+4904s in areas that are very small and don’t need a horn at all like the small hallway to the counselor’s room, the nurses office and the school-to-career offices. Plus in a back stairwell, there was a HEAD LEVEL 9838+4904 on top of the exit from the Teen Center and just going down those stairs can be considered painful. God knows what students who evacuate from the Teen Center go through and if they lose their hearing.
This one seems a bit lazy. If they own the store, and were going to tamper with the fire alarm anyway, they could’ve unmounted them and actually set the volume switch to Low.
Except they don’t have the knowledge to do that and it’s not like a technician would do it. It’s against code. They probably just thought, “this is loud! Let’s make it not loud!” It’s in an employee only area so it could already be on low volume
not legal at all.
if a fire ever happens and there’s an incident where someone isn’t alerted, that teacher is in big big trouble.
0:36
A classic Peanuts moment!
I haven’t seen this done with fire alarms at any of my schools, but I’ve seen it done with school bells; they would be muffled up with duct tape and cloth or cardboard. But to be fair, they were really loud bells.