Thanks by the way for all the comments. I put the post in for people to find flaws in the system.
I’ve been thinking about the behavioral side of this issue overnight. If I was in a hotel and discovered a fire, I would (hopefully) trot off following the fire exit signs to the nearest call point and raise the alarm. If next to the alarm was a fairly large sign that said in clear letters ‘you will not hear the alarm but security will have been called’ (or words to that effect) I might think it a bit odd, but like when I am at my local underground station, I would say to myself ‘I’ve done my bit’ and off I would go, relying on London Underground to have trained their staff.
Let’s say, on the other hand, I am a typical guest. I am Senor Lopez an elderly gent from Buenos Aires having just traveled across the Atlantic for the first time and have arrived in London where upon I have just sampled my first pint of British beer, eaten a plate of fish and chips and am now in deep jet-lag and alcohol induced sleep without having bothered reading the fire instructions in my bedroom, even though they are in Spanish, because I’ve lived to this ripe old age so far and have never had to know how to escape from a burning hotel before and doubt I will ever have to do so.
Who is actually going to discover the fire: Senor Lopez, or the smoke detector in or outside his room?
I think a lot of people get worked up about ‘sleeping risk’ that you need to have call points to raise the alarm quickly. This is probably because most hotels I’ve heard about have heat detectors in their bedrooms. We have smokes in our rooms because we realize that if a fire breaks out at night, the vast majority of people will actually be asleep and will know nothing about the fire. From our point of view, in the accommodation areas the first line of defence is the smoke detectors, an addressable panel, and a 24 hour fire team equipped with VHF radios.
When we have had incidents in the past (thankfully minor ones like a vacuum cleaner overheating) the speed in which our smoke detectors pick up the incident has always been faster than someone hitting a call point. A few years ago we had some Spanish kids setting fire to toilet rolls in their bedroom. That obviously activated the alarm in their bedroom and within seconds of them opening the bedroom door it activated a detector in the corridor and double-knocked the system. About a minute and a half later the first member of the fire team was on hand, picked up the burning toilet roll and dropped it into the bath tub and put the shower on. Three or four minutes after that the Brigade arrived having been brought out by the auto-dialler and confirmed everything was ok.
In the six years I have been involved in operating the systems we have here, never once have we been alerted to an incident by a call point actuation – it has always been through a detector activation.
By having a delay on the call point the worst thing that is going to happen is this. A businessman stays in the hotel on his own. He falls asleep with his cigarette in bed and sets fire to sheets. He leaps out, runs outside and heads for the fire exit where he finds a call point. The bedroom door closes behind him on the door closer and so no smoke goes into the corridor. By now in all probability, the smoke detector in his room would have activated, he now hits the call point and the system gets a double knock. Let’s say however, he gets to the call point first. He presses the button. Nothing happens. He is puzzled, but then sees the sign that says security are on their way. He stands there scratching his head for a few seconds more by which time the detector in the room picks up the smoke and sends the system into double knock. The hotel is tipped out etc etc etc. After the event, the businessman is downstairs at reception paying for the damage he has caused to the room by falling asleep smoking. Out of curiosity he asks the concierge why the alarm didn’t go when he pressed the button. The concierge, ably trained, says: “ah – but the alarm did go off down here – we heard it. Didn’t you see the sign that said the bells would not sound upstairs?” Businessman says ‘yes I did.’ “There you go then” says the smiling concierge.
One last thing. Come July we are banning smoking in all our bedrooms. We do not permit cooking facilities in the rooms either.
Now, does the delay on MCPs in public areas covered by smoke detectors sound unreasonable?
Terry
