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Walk, don't run to the nearest exit
Jul. 21st, 2004 08:15 pmToday was a bit different at work. There I was, at my desk this afternoon, when the Atari Fire Alarm went off. Battlezone whoops alternating with the annunciator saying to leave the building. So I lock the workstation and meet Programmer Guy in the hall. The fire marshall was out back in April for a test of the fire system, and I guess something wasn't 100%, because for the next few weeks, the building engineers would test it. As a result everyone assumed it was yet another test.
We start down one of the stairwells and realize that nobody is coming out of any of the other floors. My company is on the top (5th) floor and usually we run into the people from the other floors on the way down the fire stairs. That's about when we realized that it was a real alarm. The way the building's fire system is designed, when a fire is detected, or an alarm pulled, the alarm goes off on that floor, and the one above and below. Shortly thereafter it goes off on the next floor(s) and so on, til the whole building's alarms are sounding. The idea is to avoid congestion in the stairwells by evacuating the floor(s) nearest the fire first. Soon the 5th floor is out in the back parking lot, milling around. Not long after, people from other floors come out. Some fire engines zoom by on their way to the front of the building and we all start thinkin about the stuff we should've snagged from our desks on the way out.
Everyone stands around there for about 40 minutes, then we're given the word it's all clear. So back in we go. Never did get any official word what happend. Since the alarm went off only on the fifth floor first, odds are it was something on the roof. A couple minutes before the alarm went off, the air conditioning in the building shut down, then came back on, just blowing air. I guess something happened with an a/c unit on the roof, which set off the alarm. The system just blew air for the rest of the day, resulting in it being somewhere around 90 degrees inside by the time I went home for the day. Yuck.
At least it helped break up the day a bit.
We start down one of the stairwells and realize that nobody is coming out of any of the other floors. My company is on the top (5th) floor and usually we run into the people from the other floors on the way down the fire stairs. That's about when we realized that it was a real alarm. The way the building's fire system is designed, when a fire is detected, or an alarm pulled, the alarm goes off on that floor, and the one above and below. Shortly thereafter it goes off on the next floor(s) and so on, til the whole building's alarms are sounding. The idea is to avoid congestion in the stairwells by evacuating the floor(s) nearest the fire first. Soon the 5th floor is out in the back parking lot, milling around. Not long after, people from other floors come out. Some fire engines zoom by on their way to the front of the building and we all start thinkin about the stuff we should've snagged from our desks on the way out.
Everyone stands around there for about 40 minutes, then we're given the word it's all clear. So back in we go. Never did get any official word what happend. Since the alarm went off only on the fifth floor first, odds are it was something on the roof. A couple minutes before the alarm went off, the air conditioning in the building shut down, then came back on, just blowing air. I guess something happened with an a/c unit on the roof, which set off the alarm. The system just blew air for the rest of the day, resulting in it being somewhere around 90 degrees inside by the time I went home for the day. Yuck.
At least it helped break up the day a bit.