Fire alarms need to be less stupid

It was February of my sophomore year when I woke up to a booming noise. At 2 a.m. the fire alarms went off at Harleston Hall. My roommate and I lazily put on our coats and left ours Stay. As we walked outside into the freezing winter air, we noticed a distinct lack of urgency. No one who went outside with us believed there was actually a fire. Some people even stayed behind in their dorm rooms, placing pillows over their heads to block out the noise as they waited for the inevitable false alarm. Suffice it to say that if a fire actually occurred we would be in serious trouble.

From today, In 98% of casesWhen fire alarms go off, these are false alarms. 90% of these false alarms are due to problems with the fire alarm itself. In 2018 alone, fire departments were deployed across the country 2,889,000 false positives. The costs of responding to these false alarms are also not small. The Center for Problem-Oriented Policing estimates that responding to false alarms costs emergency services about $2.501.8 billion per year.

In my experience, almost no one takes fire alarms seriously. There are so many false alarms that the possibility of a fire alarm indicating an actual fire seems ridiculous. When a fire alarm goes off, sometimes people simply choose not to respond. Almost one in ten deaths occurs in a house fire (if there is a fire alarm) are due to the residents not reacting the alarms. It is possible that more people will leave the building due to the loud, disruptive alarm noise than there is an actual emergency. To be fair, this is intentional. Alarms are designed to motivate people to take action – If they were quieter, people would take them even less seriously. Alarm systems are particularly common in residential buildings must be loud and sharp enough to wake someone from a deep sleep.

I have wanted to remove the fire alarms from my house for a long time. They are annoying, very inaccurate and possibly even Hearing damage. But that 2 percent chance of a fire actually happening held me back. Having working fire alarms in your home reduces the chance of dying in a house fire by 60%. according to NFPA. However, even in situations where fire alarms are present, they do not always work: 16% of all home fire deaths are due to malfunctioning alarm systems.

Obviously something has to change. We need to make fire alarms more precise and we need people to take fire alarms more seriously. Fortunately, solving the former problem will likely resolve the latter as well. The sheer volume of false alarms results in a “Boy Who Cried Wolf Situation. When fire alarms only go off in the event of an actual fire, people associate the alarm with an emergency situation rather than an annoying, meaningless noise.

So how can we reduce false positives? Part of this depends on routine maintenance and testing, but let’s be honest – nobody does that. In my opinion, the most effective strategy would be to improve the fire alarms themselves. Smarter, less faulty fire alarms existthey are simply more expensive. Especially for houses or apartments that are intended to be rented out, there is no incentive for landlords to opt for a more expensive system.

However, these smarter fire alarms are significantly better. Typical fire alarms can often only detect smoke. These detectors can be easily triggered due to dust, steam or other suspended particles. Smarter fire alarms typically consist of multi-sensor systemsthat detect a combination of smoke, heat and gas. New advances in AI and machine learning enable smart fire alarms to use pattern recognition to detect when there is a real fire – significantly reducing the number of false alarms. Often these systems use lithium batteries or an external power source which means they last much longer too.

As with most devices, higher upfront costs usually result in greater savings in the long run. Smarter fire alarms may be more expensive, but the cost of replacing cheap alarms and their batteries adds up. Smarter detection systems mean that when an alarm occurs, you can be much more confident that there is an actual emergency. If we make these smarter systems a national standard, the public perception of fire alarms could change from an unreliable nuisance to a life-saving tool.