opinions-political-fireAlarmTesting

In our apartment building, the fire alarms go off every now and then, due to some neighbor's cooking.

Also, according to our building, the government requires it to test the fire alarms about once a year for a few hours. The alarms go off many, many times, every couple of minutes, for awhile.

The results:

• When the fire alarm goes off, almost no one actually goes outside, or pays any attention at all. Perhaps we would go outside if it was on for more than ten minutes.
• I often work home and stay up late (and hence, sleep in late), so sometimes I am asleep at the beginning of fire alarm testing. Last time, I slept through the first 15 minutes or so of testing. This is quite an accomplishment because I am a big insomniac who is easily woken up.
• That thing has gotta be damaging our hearing. It is a painfully loud, high pitched sound. I've stopped listening to loud music because I want to preserve my ears, so this, along with passing ambulances when I am on foot, is pretty much the loudest sound I hear. It is getting less painful over the years, which I think is a bad sign.

My conclusion: the government should balance the negative effects of frequent false alarms and of frequently hearing the fire alarm with the desire to ensure that the alarm would not fail to go off if there were an actual fire. In the event of an actual fire, it may be better to have a 99% chance of the alarm going off, and have everyone leave the building immediately when it does, rather than a 99.999% chance of the alarm going off, and have everyone ignore it for the first ten minutes (and possibly sleep through it). Yet, the latter is the situation caused by current policy.

So, I recommend that testing be made much less frequent (every decade?), and involve only activating the alarm once or twice; and that the alarms in large apartment buildings only be triggered when something so large is happening that it is very unlikely to be a mistake (in single-family homes, this isn't such a problem because you know when you are cooking; so if the alarm goes off when you aren't causing a lot of smoke yourself, you will probably react -- in an apartment building, you instead just assume that someone else was cooking).