Fire Dept. / False Fire Alarms

[kiwitechgirl]

Hooray for heat activated alarms? I think the worst venue-fire safety malfunction we have ever had was at my old job someone was driving a skyjack around to its home in the utility room basement, and jacked a sprinkler head with their head. Not only were they laid out with a bleeding head, the sprinkler system then proceeded to empty its contents into the basement. The fire marshall then approved and the college installed a manual sprinkler cut off in case of similar situations that trips the fire alarms when its activated... not sure how exactly that got approved... Seems like installing cages over the sprinkler heads would be more cost effective and safe...

We had something similar where a muppet of a crew member drove a scissor lift into a sprinkler head and snapped it off....lots of water. I also managed to flood our foyer at work when I rigged a Pacific a bit too close to a sprinkler head for a party (although we've since discovered that the "lighting bars" are actually suspended from the sprinkler pipes above the ceiling!!) and after about 3 hours the sprinkler got warm enough to trigger. The fire brigade turned up - four trucks, although the second pair drove past, got told by the first arriving fire guys that it was a sprinkler issue and went back to the station - and shut the sprinkler off and silenced the alarm (and then we gave them cake - it was a birthday party!). 600 litres of water got pumped out (over about 12-13 minutes), and we reckon there was probably another 100 in the carpet which took 3 days to dry....they put a 68 celsius degree head in to replace the 59 degree head which had triggered - the service tech commented that he thought they should probably all be switched out at some point. No-one remembers the sprinklers going off before - and we've been in the building for over 30 years - so my theory is that we were testing the system!