Fire Drills are a Good Idea
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, February 28th 2006 at 9:15am
I think the best reason to have fire drills is so that people know what the fire alarm sounds like. This is especially important if the fire alarm is not the “standard” obnoxious buzzing (a.k.a. “new school style”) or bell-ringing (a.k.a. “old-school style”) noise. For example, if the fire alarm is indistinguishable from a very loud doorbell accompanied by strobe lights – and all good doorbells have strobe lights, right? – then no one is going know what the hell that sound is, and will continue about their business as usual until a voice comes on a loudspeaker and says “Uhm … this is an emergy situation. Please remain calm and evacuate the building”.
Either way, it’s certainly an interesting way to spend the morning… sitting there, reading my e-mail, hearing this loud doorbell and staring at a strobe light (with the emitter clearly labeled “F I R E”) trying to figure out if I should, well, move. But then the ringing stopped. So I went back to work. And then finally we got the voice message on the loudspeaker.
It’s amazing how many people went straight for the escalators. That’s a pretty silly thing to do. The escalators are jam-packed when people are just getting of out of class let alone when they’re evacuating the whole freakin’ building. I took the sparsely populated stairwell and upon getting out noticed that de Maisonneuve was armed to the gills with fire trucks. Does that mean classes are cancelled for the day? I have a tutorial to give at 10:15. It’ll be weird if no one shows up.
quoting from concordia.ca:
Update, 10 a.m.: The Henry F. Hall Building is now functioning normally.
HAHAHAHAHAHA….. Oh man… that’s funny!!! Hope your school isn’t REALLY burning down.
I hate that they have to hold these “fire drills” on the coldest days of the year. Every school does it. And I bet the people who don’t carry their coats around were pretty pissed.
Hehehehe.. Good old fire drills :)
The fire bell went off during one of my night classes last semester and the teacher kept teaching. Only when it stopped ringing did he let us go. That was dumb. And great.
It just goes to show how screwed most of the students would be if there were a real fire. I bet even most of the teachers wouldn’t know which way to run to find the stairwells.
I could rant about fire drills for hours…I think I posted a rant about it in the forums.
I too ranted about fire drills, last september on my blog. These were real fire drills according to the PA which said “This is a fire drill…” So they did it in the hall building, I move to the LB, then guess what, the LB was being evacuated! Gaah! I went to school that morning to get some work done, had I known I’d have stayed in bed for a little longer.
I don’t think we’d be less screwed in the eventuality of a real fire. It’s like the kid crying wolf. Besides, I don’t think everybody will calmly go down the starewell in thick smoke that knocks you off within 2 minutes!
On the same day you posted this, there was an actual fire in the Faubourg building. I was giving a tutorial until 10:10, and when I started coming up, there was huge smoke, and I started hearing the alarms. Who knows how long the fire was burning by the time I came up with my class! The issue here is that the alarms were not at ALL connected to the Faubourg basement! So, if you ever find yourself in a class in the basement of the Faubourg, be aware that if there’s a fire, you won’t know until you see smoke!
I’ll forward your complaints regarding fire drills and fire drills’ schedule to the people in charge. They, in turn, will forward your complaints to the fire itself.