Most times when I hear an alarm (presumably for fire) go off in the office or a public place, it goes as such:
- Observe for any signs of actual emergency: smoke, smell, flame, first responders, or panicking crowds
- If nothing unusual seen and nobody is getting up, assume it’s a false alarm and continue with task at hand
- (Most of the time) Alarm was false and goes away within a few minutes
- (<1% of the time) There is indeed a fire somewhere in the building and people take their time gathering belongings before leisurely walking to the nearest door
Same goes in the house:
- Wake up groggy, assume false alarm again
- Put on pants, check out the source of the noise
- (4 times in current residence) Find no indication of fire, hush alarm
- Alarm shuts up with a dose of compressed air. If not, sledgehammer time and buy a new one the next day.
That can’t be how most of us are supposed to go about it, right?
Is it for a lack of better smoke detection technology? A consequence of buying low-quality detectors? While we’re at it, can anyone recommend a smoke detector that does its job with a minimum of false alarms?
IDK about you but I’ve always assumed any fire alarm might be real and will act accordingly. Sure most of the time it’s a false alarm, but better to be inconvenienced by having to leave unexpectedly than die in an actual fire, “boy who cried wolf” style. Being annoyed by false fire alarms is a pretty good problem to have. It means the fire protection systems where you live are working so well you’ve never actually experienced or even heard about from your friends and family the horror of being in an actual building fire.
Also, there needs to be a distinction between an individual smoke alarm and a centralized fire alarm.
Individual smoke alarms are what you have in a single family detached house, at most they may be interconnected with a signal wire so all the alarms go off when a single one goes off. These systems are designed for a building small enough that a fire in any part of the building should be immediately noticeable and common mishaps that trigger smoke alarms like burning food can be very effectively communicated to everyone in the building. As such, they don’t have a central control panel that you can use to see the status of the system nor do they automatically call the fire department. So yes, in your home (assuming it’s detached) it can generally be safe to ignore a false alarm as long as you have inspected the entire house. I definitely wouldn’t disable a smoke detector though, there are documented cases of families doing that because of a verified false alarm, followed by a real fire which burns down the house with them inside because they disabled the only protection system.
A centralized fire alarm is for multi family housing and commercial/industrial buildings. These buildings are large enough that it is impossible for any individual to figure out why a fire alarm is going off, but they also tend to have false alarm protection built in, for example, they may need both a smoke and heat detector in the same area to go off before issuing a general alarm for the entire building. In apartments and other attached housing, the smoke detectors in each unit are usually the former individual type and only the detectors in the common areas like hallways are apart of the centralized system. The logic is that smoke in a single apartment may not actually be a fire or at the very least it’s being contained by the unit which usually has fire containment considerations as part of the design, but smoke in the common areas (meaning the smoke has breached the door) is more likely to be life threatening to everyone in the building. These systems are also the ones with the pull handles for manually triggering an alarm, and the vast majority of the time a centralized system has a false alarm, especially in a commercial building, it’s because some shithead pulled one of the manual alarm handles. But, again, the nature of these buildings is that you literally cannot be sure there’s no fire, and large buildings also have a ton of inaccessible space for wiring and ventilation and such, and if a fire is spreading through those spaces, you could be right next to it and not notice anything until the fire violently breaks through the wall (again, there are documented cases of this happening). So it’s better to just GTFO and let the fire department clear it.
It’s a case by case thing. My dad worked in construction for 40 years, and half the stuff he did involved setting off fire alarms due to tools producing smoke or every other person smoking. One time when my mom was in labor, the fire alarm went off at the hospital, and he said “what’s everyone worried about? It’s just the fire alarm”
The problem is not the detection system or that people don’t believe it.
The problem is that people don’t seem to understand the utility of behaving like something is true while “knowing” it is not true.
E.g. let’s say, I “know” the gun is not loaded, should I point the gun at a friend and pull the trigger? No.
Verifying information before acting in a way that would put people in danger, is worth wasting time for.
There is no technical solution. People don’t believe bad things can happen too them until it does.
Live through a single tornado and you will never ignore another tornado warning.
Live through one flood and you will never ignore another evacuation order again.
Same with a fire alarm.
Your entire post sounds like user-problem? I’ve only experienced one false-alarm in my entire life… and that was because I had a guest who assumed I’d be okay with her smoking in my living room.
I don’t know about the alarm systems in public places, but for my own alarms, I would disagree. They were placed according to manufacturer instructions and the ones that refuse to stay quiet even when there is no smoke, are pristine on the inside when taken apart. Complete with sealed “10-year” battery from no more than 5 years ago.
Fortunately, the replacements I’ve installed seem less problematic than those that came with the house.
Just want to say: False positives for a firealarm … are much better than a false negative, meaning fire without an alarm.
This makes it really hard to argue for anything other then the status quo without reducing security.
(<1% of the time) There is indeed a fire somewhere in the building and people take their time gathering belongings before leisurely walking to the nearest door
/ positive negative true true positive, there is a fire 🔥 and alarm is on 🚨, peoples lives saved true negative, no fire, no alarm, no worries false false positive, the situation you want to avoid 🚨, bad false negative, there is a fire 🔥, but no alarm, really bad Problem is, too many false positives can turn every fire alarm into a true/false negative. If it goes off too many times, people don’t act appropriately when there actually is a fire.
It happens often enough at my job that I don’t even bother to check if it’s real anymore. If i hear screaming I guess I’ll head for the door.
Essentially this article explains it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_(information_retrieval)
Since the cost of a false negative is really high, people would die in such a case, you want to optimize for recall.
Yeah, but the mild inconvenience though
In most places I worked or studied, if the fire alarm went off, everyone was obliged to go out, false alarm or not
Last place I worked on site was the same. I sat in a SCIF, so there was only a single door, no windows, sound deadening padding on the walls and white noise pumped in. We weren’t hearing shit in there. So, if the fire alarm went off, we all grabbed our things and walked out. Not leaving for a fire alarm was grounds for adverse employee actions. We also had a lady from OSHA come through regularly and give management hell for any life safety issue. Complete hard-ass, and we were all safer for it. This is really how it should be. There’s too long a history of workplaces putting their employees at risk to eek out the slightest bit more profit.
Probably because experience has taught them that. How many actual building fires have you been in, and how many fire alarms have you evacuated for? For me, 100% of the fire alarms I’ve evacuated for have either been a false alarm or a test.
Watch the video of the Station Nightclub Fire. You’ll be scarred, but you won’t ignore fire alarms.
Is that the Great White one? The horrors. I am haunted by that footage. Like Dante’s inferno brought to life in the flesh. We watched it in my apprenticeship. That and the fire in the MGM grand. Needless to say I took my fire alarm installs very seriously when most don’t. I never want any systems I touched to fail.
is it the one where the vigil was stopping people from getting out by the artist exit?
I recall that people were piling up and it was almost impossible to drag them out. Not just fire alarms, but ensure there are enough exits, and exits big enough for the number of people in the building. It’s something I gauge when I go into a concert venue for example.
There is nuance in installing fire alarms, make sure you are using the correct detector type for each area, and installing it correctly.
I’m pretty sure strong drafts or dusty areas can set it off.
Also know that smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors are consumable items that should be replaced, usually 7-10 years but it should be noted on the device.
At the end of the day, it wakes you up to check, or causes you to observe for an emergency. Imagine your wake up groggy situation but you smell smoke. Personally I would like that chance to be able to evacuate.
I once stayed at an AirBnB that had the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen installed: On close inspection it’s revealed to be a heat detector. It’s designed to go off at temperatures over 50°C. It was installed directly above the oven.
After it triggered for the fourth time in an hour while cooking, I smashed it off the ceiling and complained about the overall quality of the apartment. The owner never had the audacity to charge me for it
It may have been a rate of rise vs a hard upper limit for the heat detector. If it was, about 8-10°C / 15-20°F change per minute would set it off. Makes sense for it to go off over an oven. The hard upper limit type are single use, I don’t know if that causes them to repeatedly go off or not.
Either way with more regulated short term rentals, a fire inspection would likely have flagged that.
As a Californian, this is how I react to earthquakes.
That’s a decently rational response you’ve described, though. If you were really at immediate risk, you’d probably know it, especially with an alarm going off to get you looking for signs of danger. And it’s usually better to have a lazy, skeptical evacuation than a panicked stampede. Schools do fire drills to check the alarms, sure, but it’s also important to make them a routine thing that all the kids know how to handle.
