Appeal 34936

unknown (alarms?)

I am requesting a change be made to the alarm process of the hope center, currently our process dictates that our monitoring service activates the fire department and then calls the chain of leadership here at the facility, causing undue stress on the system as you can see from the attached documents regarding the monitoring system, with calls being highlighted we average a call at two times per month for calls that have always been false alarms, due to burnt food in the microwave or something as simple as cleaning our bathrooms with water from our taps.

We are seeking to change the process that occurs after a fire alarm has been triggered to decrease the strain on the system and avoid charges from false alarms.

We here at the Hope Center humbly request the following change:

In lieu of the current system of Alarm alerts monitoring service > Fire Department activated > Facility alerted by monitoring service and request for clarification > clarification of false alarm given to monitoring service > Facility has to call the Fire house directly to stop deployment

We instead implement the following chain: Alarm alerts monitoring service > Facility called and clarification requested > if no information known or an actual emergency is ensuing Fire Department is then dispatched as normal.

We are a non profit homeless shelter operating out of a renovated detention facility, our fire alarm system is so sensitive we have had to ban popcorn and toasters due to the amount of false alarms. Our firehouse has been incredibly patient with us, however; they have informed us that they will charge us if they deploy to such an alarm, sometimes that is 3 times in a week leading this to be very prohibitive. I cannot unfortunately lessen the sensitivity of the alarm system built into the building so we are looking at other avenues as to how to address this as our population grows from 175 to 325.

Thank you for your time and attention with this unfortunate matter,
-Nathan Majors