Automatic False Alarms

The two most popular ways of pranking the fire department used to be pulling the lever on a street fire-alarm box or calling in a false alarm on the telephone. Street boxes were a huge problem as it was too easy for jokesters to yank on them and disappear, so sometimes the same box would get pulled multiple times a day. More creative types preferred calling them in so they could have the satisfaction of weaving a tale of carnage that would be convincing enough to bring out a large, noisy fire department response. Caller ID now discourages the phone-ins and street boxes have all but disappeared from most cities, so now we rely on modern technology to provide us with an ample supply of false alarms.

Automatic Fire Alarm systems (AKA “AFAs” or “Automatic False Alarms”) have been a blessing and a curse for fire departments. The Fire Code wisely requires some sort of fire-alarm system in many types of buildings, and when it doesn’t, lots of businesses and homeowners still choose to install one to alert them when a fire is still in it’s early, more manageable stages by either sniffing smoke, sensing heat or detecting water flowing in a sprinkler system. Because we live in a world of humans and bedbugs, 99% of the alarm activations that we are sent to check on usually consist of one of the following: water surge, burnt microwave popcorn, trucks and forklifts breaking sprinkler pipes, dust, malicious bedbugs and spiders squatting in smoke detectors and setting them off, bad cooking, kids livening up the school day by tripping a pull-station, gremlins in the system that set it off at random times for no apparent reason. I could go on. Because the vast majority of alarm activations are not emergencies, it’s hard for residents of apartment buildings, workers and firefighters to take them seriously every time, especially in buildings where they are a chronic problem.

When I worked in NW Portland in the late 1990s, we had an apartment house we were dispatched to 3 or 4 times a week, always at dinnertime. The building dated from the 1905 World’s Fair and was still missing some modern amenities, like kitchen fans, windows that opened and tenants who had rudimentary cooking skills. When someone inevitably burned their grilled baloney sandwich, they would open the door to move the smoke out of their apartment and into the hallway where the smoke detectors were, setting off the alarm and interrupting the “Jello Course” of our meal at the firehouse yet again. The manager was doing her best, she would hustle to make sure there wasn’t a real fire, turn off the alarm and meet us at the door. She was kind of bailing out the few chronic offenders by silencing the bells early, so the residents knew they only had to tolerate it for a minute or two which wasn’t a good enough reason to get too worked up or for the culprits to change their behavior. Our crews, on the other hand, were getting pretty fed-up with runny Jello. It just so happened that we had been watching our favorite scenes from the movie Full Metal Jacket multiple times a month and it had inspired a brilliant plan. Remember the scene when the platoon gets tired of being punished for Private Pyle’s screw-ups? One night, the whole platoon held a counseling session at his bunk to make some suggestions on how he could best improve his performance. Almost instantly, he became a model recruit, “born again hard” as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman would say. So we told the manager that from now on, she wasn’t allowed to silence the alarm until we got there and officially confirmed there was no emergency. The next few alarms, we took our time getting there and checking for the source of the problem before we gave her the all-clear to quiet the bells. Audible alarms are meant to be extremely annoying so it drives people bonkers and motivates them to leave the building, so our new procedures meant that was going on for at least 10 minutes each time. Soon, we were hearing words being exchanged between the chefs and their fellow residents. We never knew for sure what exactly transpired amongst them, but it didn’t take long before our visits there became few and far between.

Then there’s the 1% of the time.

A frequent Port O’ Call for us in NW Portland around that time was the Civic Apartments, right across from “Civic” Stadium, now known as Providence Park. In 2007, it was demolished and a new 6-story building took it’s place called The Morrison. The Civic took up most of an irregular block right across from not only the stadium, but also Portland Firefighter’s Park, our memorial to city firefighters killed in the line of duty. The Civic was a regular stop for us as it had an outdated and buggy alarm system that was continually sending false alarms. Around midnight one evening I was working on Truck 3 and we were returning from another alarm call when we were dispatched to the Civic. On commercial alarms, standard procedure is for the guys in the back to have their gear on (me and my partner in this case) so we’re prepared in case it’s for real, but we came here so often on malfunctions it seemed silly, especially since the manager had already indicated to dispatch that there was no fire. He met us at the door and showed us that the panel was indicating that a smoke detector in the basement had triggered it. He walked us down to the laundry room - the part of the basement he swore was involved - and, as usual, nada. The engine had responded with us, so our officer sent them back to the station and then tried to help the manager reset the alarm while the rest of us gave the all-clear to the whopping 6 or so residents out of maybe 200 who had taken it seriously and were waiting outside.

After a bit, I went back inside and wandered down one of the long 1st floor hallways while our officer and the manager fiddled with the alarm panel, which was still stubbornly showing that there was a problem. There had been a few very minor fire-sets in the stairwells lately, so I wanted to make sure we weren’t missing anything. Maybe 50 feet down the hall from the office I smelled something funny. My partner had caught up with me and we saw light smoke seeping out from under an apartment door. Aha! As weird as the fire-alarm was in that building we figured this must have something to do with it, so we pounded on the door and started wagging our fingers and chewing out the resident for not stepping up and confessing to setting the alarm off. “I just came home to this, I didn’t do anything!” He opened the door a little more and we noticed there was smoke pouring from his baseboards, light fixtures, outlets and kitchen fan. You know that vertigo-like trick they use in movies like Jaws when Chief Brody is sitting on the beach and the camera zooms in on him while the background fades away just after he saw little Alex get eaten by the shark? Yeah, that was how it felt as we realized how unprepared we were for this development and how much we had to do in the next 3 minutes. I got on the radio and let our officer know we had trouble and we manually tripped the fire-alarm to start waking people back up and then ran out to the truck to gather our gear. The engine returned to see black smoke pouring out of every basement window on the stadium side. Their officer called for a 2nd alarm on his arrival - skipping right past the 1st alarm - which immediately sent us 7 additional engines, 3 ladder trucks and about 50 more firefighters. The engine pulled the first hose-line into the involved apartment and we started opening the walls to try to find the fire. Some of the rest of our crew started pounding on doors and doing their best to convince dozens of sleeping people in that wing that this one was actually for real. Despite bashing up most of that poor guys apartment, we weren’t finding fire and I remember thinking the smoke level in the hallway was dropping towards the floor way too fast.

As Engine 1 pulled up, they could see into the center courtyard/parking area where fire was blowing out of the boiler room. They knocked it down quickly from the outside, but our troubles weren’t over because the fire was now climbing the walls and spreading upwards, lighting up apartments as it went. In multi-story buildings, kitchens and bathrooms are often back-to-back with those in adjacent units so they can run pipes and other shared utilities upwards in fewer places in what are called “pipe-chases.” This also makes a great place for fire to spread, so when trying to get ahead of a vertically running fire, bathrooms and kitchens are the first places you want to start opening walls and ceilings. We had gotten everyone in immediate danger safely out of the building so we all went to work to keep it out of adjacent units and try to stop it before it reached the “cockloft,” a weird word of disputed origin that means a short, open, flat-roofed attic. Cockloft fires are tough because they are extremely labor intensive requiring lots of firefighters on the roof opening vent holes to slow it down while coordinating with crews on the top floor pulling down ceilings and putting water on it from below. When you see news footage of ladder trucks pouring water onto the top of a burning multi-story building, that usually means the cockloft fire won the fight. We were on the 3rd floor as it started burning apartments there and we were well positioned to knock the fires down and get into the walls to keep it from climbing any further. When all was said and done, you could see some minor scorching at the base of the cockloft, it was that close.

It turned out that the alarm panel was - big surprise - wired incorrectly, and the detectors in the fire room and the room that the panel claimed had the problem, were switched around. They were a bit remote from each other, and we didn’t sense any issues when the manager took us downstairs to check, so we took it at face value. Boiler rooms are built to be fire-resistive so theoretically they will keep problems inside them from spreading for at least an hour, but there was obviously a structural failure which allowed the fire to quickly get into the rest of the building. The building’s history of chronic false alarms made for almost complete indifference from the tenants and it was hard to blame them. We were also convinced, based on the best info we had initially, that there was nothing going on, so our thoughts had turned to the leftover Jello back at the station.

Defective boiler starting a fire, defective ceiling that allowed it to spread to living units above, defective alarm system that initially led us down the wrong rabbit hole, time of day (midnight) when pretty much everyone is in their units and sleeping, smoke filling the hallways due to the delay in detection, delay in calling for extra help because we didn’t think anything was going on. Subtract out a couple of those factors, things don’t turn out to be quite as big a deal. Include all of those and add 5 more minutes until we discover the fire and maybe 19 people die like at that apartment fire in the Bronx two weeks ago.

Gordon Graham is a risk-management lawyer who has given a lot of talks about how “high-risk/low-frequency” events can go good or bad. Whenever my daughter and I travel and stay in hotels, she always gives me the obligatory eye-roll when I report back to her on where the fire-extinguishers are and the number of doors in each direction until you get to the stairwells so you can find them in the smoke. I remind her to have her clothes ready to get into, know where your wallet and keys are, have a flashlight. Like Gordon says, remove a few risk factors, be calm, plan ahead a little bit, make a few wise choices and maybe the “high-risk, low-frequency” event doesn’t go so badly. She has no idea how many times I’ve probably saved her life already, but I’m sure she’ll thank me someday.

Please remember to give to Make A Wish of Oregon whenever you can, enjoy this clip from Gordon Graham and learn about the origin of “cockloft.”

https://wish.org/oregon

http://www.wordsmith.org/words/cockloft.html