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Oh, there's much worse problems at least when it comes to fire alarms in apartment buildings -- people simply refusing to leave their home. I live in a (modern

by MrFoof 10y ago

Oh, there's much worse problems at least when it comes to fire alarms in apartment buildings -- people simply refusing to leave their home. I live in a (modern, 4-floor, built in 2008, steel and concrete) building with 145 apartments. We have about 2 or 3 fire alarms a year because late-20s professionals don’t understand that pouring oil into a pan heated on high for 20 minutes does nothing but generate a massive amount of smoke. Though in 7 years, we’ve had 3 actual fires. One serious enough to pop the glycerin disk of a sprinkler head (and cause ~$1M in water damage from the ~5000 gallons it pumped out before it was turned off, compared to about $20-30K in fire damage). I am the building’s “unofficial first responder”. I try to find it, so I can direct fire fighters to it when they arrive 8 minutes later, in the hopes of it being dealt with before a sprinkler head pops and makes the lives of many of the units' neighbors miserable for the next few months (because water damage and related insurance claims). Once, management was still here, and we used the skeleton key to access the unit and I actually put it out myself with an extinguisher (and killed the breakers to the stove). As I’m running through the hall, I have to tell people peering out their doors to “get out now, fire alarm”, and that no, they can’t take the elevator (because they’re now parked) and they need to take stairs. When there are firefighters going into the building, with hoses, and putting up ladders, you have people in neighboring apartments watching... from the windows inside their apartments. Until the fire department knocks on their doors and screams at them, through a megaphone, to get out. Management commented to me that during the fire alarms with actual fires (which granted, were small), ~30% of people (~80-90 people) refused to leave. That's a hell of a potential burden in the event of a serious fire to put on the firefighters.

archon 10y ago
> people simply refusing to leave their home. This is the same in offices, in my experience. Our shared office building has a horrible fire system, and gets about a half dozen false fire alarms a year. My coworkers think I'm crazy for always going directly outside when the alarm starts blaring. Sooner or later, one of those "false alarms" is going to be real and people will still be sitting at their desks while the building is really on fire.
- phkahler 10y ago
  This reminded me of 9/11. I thought I heard that people in the second tower were being told by an official to stay at their desks. Why the heck would anyone advise people to remain with that huge and severely damaged building burning so close by? Just looking out the windows would have made me want to get far away from there. Did they really advise people to stay or is my memory faulty?
  - Atheros 10y ago
    After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, it turned out, in hindsight, that the best course of action was for people to say where they were. That memory and lesson was not lost by 2001. "Altogether, six people were killed and 1,042 others injured, most during the evacuation that followed the blast." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...
- grahamburger 10y ago
  I had this happen a few years ago. First day in a newly renovated part of the office. We had been told that there might be testing going on on the alarm system and that it might go off. Alarm starts going off and no one pays much attention until the smoke starts pouring through the hallways. A few offices didn't have a good view of the smoke and at least one of my co-workers stayed in the building for a good 15-20 minutes after everyone else left. No one injured, fortunately!
- rwmj 10y ago
  > Sooner or later, one of those "false alarms" is going to be real and people will still be sitting at their desks while the building is really on fire. Most people will never in their whole lives experience a real building fire. It would be much better to make false alarms extremely rare. Perhaps we could do a Toyota-style "five whys" for every single false alarm until the fire alarm in your office is fixed properly.
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> Management commented to me that during the fire alarms with actual fires (which granted, were small), ~30% of people (~80-90 people) refused to leave. That's a hell of a potential burden in the event of a serious fire to put on the firefighters. It's not great, but you can see where they're coming from, with 2.5 alarms per year compared to 0.5 fires.
- duaneb 10y ago
  > It's not great, but you can see where they're coming from, with 2.5 alarms per year compared to 0.5 fires. I don't understand. I've experienced probably around a hundred fire alarms in my life and maybe two fires. A 1/5 chance that an alarm means a fire is an excellent reason to leave the apartment every time—That's a terrible rate to justify staying inside.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    A 1/5 rate of there being a fire is a far lower rate of there being a fire that threatens you.
    - duaneb 10y ago
      I mean, if you want to go that route, it's your skin that will roast.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
mindcrime 10y ago
Being a former firefighter, I totally understand this problem. But by the same token, I can understand how people become complacent in regards to automatic alarms. Hell, it even happens to us when certain buildings have automatic alarms that go off repeatedly. But, as you might guess, eventually the real deal hits. Back in my firefighting days we had a church in Shallotte that had an automatic alarm that had frequent false alarms. So much so that if that call came in, we would admittedly not hurry go get into turnout gear and get on the rig... we'd lollygag around a minute or two waiting for the inevitable cancellation notice. Then one day, that alarm comes in, and two minutes later dispatch comes back "police office on scene advises smoke showing". Urk! There's really no easy answer to this though... people are going to be who and how they are. All we can do is try out best to get people to do the right thing.
- MrFoof 10y ago
  >But, as you might guess, eventually the real deal hits. This happened about 7 blocks away a week or two ago. Older building (1950s, wood and brick), 5 stories, 15 units. Unlike my building (CAL133 compliant cabinets, modern fireproofing, lots of sprinklers) it probably didn't have sprinklers. It went 6 alarms. If you didn't leave immediately, you would've had no chance to afterwards. Fatalities were probably all but guaranteed for anyone who lacked the wherewithal to get out. Thankfully, folks had the common sense to get out quickly and I believe there weren't even any injuries.
- Gravityloss 10y ago
  The real fix is to have less false alarms.
  - jrs235 10y ago
    In the office building I work in the smoke detectors van be a bit sensitive. After burnt microwave popcorn setting the alarm off several times "policy" was changed that if a false alarm was triggered by a sensor in a tenants area that was preventable that tenant would have to pay a $500 fine. False alarms have almost ended since then... seems people and businesses don't care for $502 popcorn.
gwbas1c 10y ago
Chicken Little alarms should never be tolerated. Looks like the alarms in your building are just chicken little. Hopefully your building is apartments instead of condos. If I lived in such a situation, I'd get out of there ASAP. Nothing's worse then getting pulled out of sexy time because Chicken Little is running around screaming that the sky is falling.
slg 10y ago
The problem is the number of false positives. Odds are the first few alarms a new resident will leave their apartment (at least from my experience). But people become desensitized to if after they see false alarm after false alarm. It becomes a boy who cried wolf situation. A similar problem exists with car alarms. What percentage of car alarms going off are in response to a legitimate threat of theft? I would imagine it is in the single digits at the highest. This leads to most people reacting to car alarms with mere annoyance rather than any suspicion of an actual crime. I don't know a real solution to this. It is really just human nature to react to personal experience and if that experience says alarms are usually wrong, we will begin to ignore them. Meanwhile the makers of the alarms have an incentive to be overly sensitive because a false positive is much less dangerous than a false negative. This results in a sort of tragedy of the commons in which all alarms end up being too prone to trigger accidentally.
- piotrkaminski 10y ago
  > Meanwhile the makers of the alarms have an incentive to be overly sensitive because a false positive is much less dangerous than a false negative. I wonder whether this is actually statistically true, if false positives cause true positives to be ignored by some non-trivial proportion of the population? I think it's just as likely this is legal CYA from the alarm makers -- they can only get sued for false negatives, after all.
  - saulrh 10y ago
    To them a false negative is worse than a false positive, for precisely the reason you describe: it simply doesn't matter how many false positives you have, but the very first false negative destroys your company. Their optimization function is not fire safety. It's making money, which is only mostly associated with fire safety.
    - piotrkaminski 10y ago
      Right, so I wonder how we could change the incentives so their optimization function is a little more socially responsible? Perhaps a law that allows civil lawsuits for false positive alarms would help, but I'd be afraid of unexpected side-effects.
tomjen3 10y ago
If you have fire alarms that are not serious that often, it is just going to cause people to ignore them. We had a problem with the fire alarm going of every two weeks or so at my university (all were false alarms) and people just flatly ignore it.
maxerickson 10y ago
You are explaining that you seek out the dangerous fire in the same breath you complain that others don't run away from it fast enough. Which hey, fine, you know better, but how many people from the building have been dragged out of a fire by the fire fighters? For all the people that haven't been rescued, why conclude that their risk assessment is so much worse than yours?
slv77 10y ago
Anybody else get excited when you hear about an obvious opportunity to solve a problem? Like water damage due to fire sprinklers and then get disappointed that there is already a solution? HiFog - Uses water mist to prevent limit damage: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_NsBZ7oXok https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_NsBZ7oXok Then you think... Maybe it could be made better?

by MrFoof 10y ago

archon 10y ago

> people simply refusing to leave their home. This is the same in offices, in my experience. Our shared office building has a horrible fire system, and gets about a half dozen false fire alarms a year. My coworkers think I'm crazy for always going directly outside when the alarm starts blaring. Sooner or later, one of those "false alarms" is going to be real and people will still be sitting at their desks while the building is really on fire.

phkahler 10y ago
This reminded me of 9/11. I thought I heard that people in the second tower were being told by an official to stay at their desks. Why the heck would anyone advise people to remain with that huge and severely damaged building burning so close by? Just looking out the windows would have made me want to get far away from there. Did they really advise people to stay or is my memory faulty?
- Atheros 10y ago
  After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, it turned out, in hindsight, that the best course of action was for people to say where they were. That memory and lesson was not lost by 2001. "Altogether, six people were killed and 1,042 others injured, most during the evacuation that followed the blast." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...
grahamburger 10y ago
I had this happen a few years ago. First day in a newly renovated part of the office. We had been told that there might be testing going on on the alarm system and that it might go off. Alarm starts going off and no one pays much attention until the smoke starts pouring through the hallways. A few offices didn't have a good view of the smoke and at least one of my co-workers stayed in the building for a good 15-20 minutes after everyone else left. No one injured, fortunately!
rwmj 10y ago
> Sooner or later, one of those "false alarms" is going to be real and people will still be sitting at their desks while the building is really on fire. Most people will never in their whole lives experience a real building fire. It would be much better to make false alarms extremely rare. Perhaps we could do a Toyota-style "five whys" for every single false alarm until the fire alarm in your office is fixed properly.

thaumasiotes 10y ago

> Management commented to me that during the fire alarms with actual fires (which granted, were small), ~30% of people (~80-90 people) refused to leave. That's a hell of a potential burden in the event of a serious fire to put on the firefighters. It's not great, but you can see where they're coming from, with 2.5 alarms per year compared to 0.5 fires.

duaneb 10y ago
> It's not great, but you can see where they're coming from, with 2.5 alarms per year compared to 0.5 fires. I don't understand. I've experienced probably around a hundred fire alarms in my life and maybe two fires. A 1/5 chance that an alarm means a fire is an excellent reason to leave the apartment every time—That's a terrible rate to justify staying inside.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  A 1/5 rate of there being a fire is a far lower rate of there being a fire that threatens you.
  - duaneb 10y ago
    I mean, if you want to go that route, it's your skin that will roast.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

mindcrime 10y ago

Being a former firefighter, I totally understand this problem. But by the same token, I can understand how people become complacent in regards to automatic alarms. Hell, it even happens to us when certain buildings have automatic alarms that go off repeatedly. But, as you might guess, eventually the real deal hits. Back in my firefighting days we had a church in Shallotte that had an automatic alarm that had frequent false alarms. So much so that if that call came in, we would admittedly not hurry go get into turnout gear and get on the rig... we'd lollygag around a minute or two waiting for the inevitable cancellation notice. Then one day, that alarm comes in, and two minutes later dispatch comes back "police office on scene advises smoke showing". Urk! There's really no easy answer to this though... people are going to be who and how they are. All we can do is try out best to get people to do the right thing.

MrFoof 10y ago
>But, as you might guess, eventually the real deal hits. This happened about 7 blocks away a week or two ago. Older building (1950s, wood and brick), 5 stories, 15 units. Unlike my building (CAL133 compliant cabinets, modern fireproofing, lots of sprinklers) it probably didn't have sprinklers. It went 6 alarms. If you didn't leave immediately, you would've had no chance to afterwards. Fatalities were probably all but guaranteed for anyone who lacked the wherewithal to get out. Thankfully, folks had the common sense to get out quickly and I believe there weren't even any injuries.
Gravityloss 10y ago
The real fix is to have less false alarms.
- jrs235 10y ago
  In the office building I work in the smoke detectors van be a bit sensitive. After burnt microwave popcorn setting the alarm off several times "policy" was changed that if a false alarm was triggered by a sensor in a tenants area that was preventable that tenant would have to pay a $500 fine. False alarms have almost ended since then... seems people and businesses don't care for $502 popcorn.

gwbas1c 10y ago

Chicken Little alarms should never be tolerated. Looks like the alarms in your building are just chicken little. Hopefully your building is apartments instead of condos. If I lived in such a situation, I'd get out of there ASAP. Nothing's worse then getting pulled out of sexy time because Chicken Little is running around screaming that the sky is falling.

slg 10y ago

The problem is the number of false positives. Odds are the first few alarms a new resident will leave their apartment (at least from my experience). But people become desensitized to if after they see false alarm after false alarm. It becomes a boy who cried wolf situation. A similar problem exists with car alarms. What percentage of car alarms going off are in response to a legitimate threat of theft? I would imagine it is in the single digits at the highest. This leads to most people reacting to car alarms with mere annoyance rather than any suspicion of an actual crime. I don't know a real solution to this. It is really just human nature to react to personal experience and if that experience says alarms are usually wrong, we will begin to ignore them. Meanwhile the makers of the alarms have an incentive to be overly sensitive because a false positive is much less dangerous than a false negative. This results in a sort of tragedy of the commons in which all alarms end up being too prone to trigger accidentally.

piotrkaminski 10y ago
> Meanwhile the makers of the alarms have an incentive to be overly sensitive because a false positive is much less dangerous than a false negative. I wonder whether this is actually statistically true, if false positives cause true positives to be ignored by some non-trivial proportion of the population? I think it's just as likely this is legal CYA from the alarm makers -- they can only get sued for false negatives, after all.
- saulrh 10y ago
  To them a false negative is worse than a false positive, for precisely the reason you describe: it simply doesn't matter how many false positives you have, but the very first false negative destroys your company. Their optimization function is not fire safety. It's making money, which is only mostly associated with fire safety.
  - piotrkaminski 10y ago
    Right, so I wonder how we could change the incentives so their optimization function is a little more socially responsible? Perhaps a law that allows civil lawsuits for false positive alarms would help, but I'd be afraid of unexpected side-effects.

tomjen3 10y ago

If you have fire alarms that are not serious that often, it is just going to cause people to ignore them. We had a problem with the fire alarm going of every two weeks or so at my university (all were false alarms) and people just flatly ignore it.

maxerickson 10y ago

You are explaining that you seek out the dangerous fire in the same breath you complain that others don't run away from it fast enough. Which hey, fine, you know better, but how many people from the building have been dragged out of a fire by the fire fighters? For all the people that haven't been rescued, why conclude that their risk assessment is so much worse than yours?

slv77 10y ago

Anybody else get excited when you hear about an obvious opportunity to solve a problem? Like water damage due to fire sprinklers and then get disappointed that there is already a solution? HiFog - Uses water mist to prevent limit damage: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_NsBZ7oXok https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_NsBZ7oXok Then you think... Maybe it could be made better?