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Topic: Check your electrical wiring!

Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 11-03-2003 01:28 AM

quote:
Last summer my family stood outside a Boston hotel at 3:00 am after a false alarm. Less than half the people in the hotel took the alarm seriously enough to evacuate, many looking out the windows at the "fools" standing in the parking lot in their robes as the alarms blared and fire trucks drove up. Now I know we did the right thing.

This raises what is, IMHO, a very important point: badly designed and/or installed fire alarm systems repeatedly setting off false alarms. What tends to happen is that over time, employees/patrons/residents of a building will gradually take it less seriously - a sort of electronic 'boy who cried wolf' syndrome. Then when there really is a fire, people won't evacuate.

This became a real problem in one newly-opened cinema I worked at. There were two issues with the fire alarm: firstly, all the dust from the building work was repeatedly triggering the photoelectric heads, and the rate-of-rise heat detectors were set at far too high a sensitivity rating, and they too would trigger false alarms. At one stage it was going off one or twice a week, and always a false alarm. Regular customers didn't like it either, and things got to the stage at which they were writing complaint letters and demanding refunds.

The fire alarm contractors were singularly useless and it took six months of mieowing and hissing at them before they finally managed to get the system reasonably stable. I'm convinced that if there had been a real fire during that period, there would have been a real risk of injury or worse because by that stage no-one was treating the alarm seriously.

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David Stambaugh
Film God

Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002

posted 11-03-2003 10:42 AM

One thing I forgot to mention about that popcorn fire is the fire alarm had triggered in the theatre lobby, and it seemed that nobody at the theatre or the mall could shut it off (by design maybe?). It was one of those high-frequency ear-piercing alarms. Presumably the alarms also went off in the auditoriums. When I got there, the fire was already completely extinguished, but it took the Fire Dept. a good 15 more mins. before they arrived, and another 10 mins. to shut off the shrieking alarm.

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Mark Hajducki
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 500
From: Edinburgh, UK
Registered: May 2003

posted 11-03-2003 11:07 AM

quote:
This became a real problem in one newly-opened cinema I worked at. There were two issues with the fire alarm: firstly, all the dust from the building work was repeatedly triggering the photoelectric heads, and the rate-of-rise heat detectors were set at far too high a sensitivity rating, and they too would trigger false alarms. At one stage it was going off one or twice a week, and always a false alarm. Regular customers didn't like it either, and things got to the stage at which they were writing complaint letters and demanding refunds.

What is worse is having a newly opened cinema in a not fully opened mall where there is still building work going on. (That plus a multi-story carpark where the local neds find it fun to smash the break glass alarm points). At least we have a phased alarm system that allows us to avoid evacuating the screens until the fire/incident is confirmed.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 11-04-2003 01:48 AM

quote:
What is worse is having a newly opened cinema in a not fully opened mall where there is still building work going on.

Or even worse still, having an alarm system which is interlinked with others that are under the control of morons. Some of our false alarms at the place I mentioned above happened because there was a bar and a restaurant unit in the same building as the cinema, and the fire officer demanded that all three alarm systems would be interlinked, i.e. any fire signal on one would set off the other two. At the time the bar was managfed by someone who was as thick as two short planks: she neither knew nor cared how her system worked, even at the basic level of checking an activated head and then resetting. And the restaurant unit had a poncy, authentic wood-burning pizza oven, which as you can imagine was a class A pain in the bum.

I've come across 'ned' in a John Buchan novel from the '30s (one of the characters was from the Gorbals area of Glasgow), so Oxford is clearly a bit behind the times!

The best we can do down here is the 'Donnie lass' - i.e. hard-living, hard-drinking hell-raising females from Doncaster, who are often to be seen in the pubs of York and Leeds on a weekend evening. Can't find any of 'em on the net, though: probably just as well!

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Mark Hajducki
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 500
From: Edinburgh, UK
Registered: May 2003

posted 11-04-2003 06:55 AM

quote:
I've come across 'ned' in a John Buchan novel from the '30s (one of the characters was from the Gorbals area of Glasgow), so Oxford is clearly a bit behind the times!

Oxford English Dictionary gives an example of ned from 1910, however it does not give (what is thought to be) the meaning of non educated delinquent.

There has been long debates as to whether ned is an acceptable term for use in the Scottish Parliment (well they have to do something there)

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