Real world evacuations With Pete Davies @That_Fire_Guy

Hello! Why all the racket? The role of the fire alarm is changing. Good morning. You may be wondering why I started like that. It’s to point out that you were not particularly startled by that. No-one ran out the room, at least I hope not.

Are we desensitised to alarms? Images: Fire alarm, police siren, school bell, We hear alarms all the time, fire drills, sirens, bells, clocks. Even my phone. We don’t associate alarms with an emergency.

Are we desensitised to alarms? So what really happens when a fire alarm goes off? This happens. 5 and a half minutes before someone got up. “When people only have a single stimulus, they don’t know what to do”

1 in 6 people have a hearing impairment On top of all this, there’s a good proportion of users who simply can’t hear a regular fire alarm!

How we evacuate OK, so 5 minutes later, we convinced everyone it’s really fire alarm, ran around making sure no-one with a hearing impairment missed the alarm while they were in the loo. Evacuation is now underway

False alarm And finally after all of that, it turned out to be a false alarm.

New ways to evacuate

New ways to evacuate — Deaf notification Firstly, for all those who can’t hear the alarm, there are systems that link to your fire panel and send automated messages- Elaborate on this.

New ways to evacuate — Silent evacuation We made this video for our European customers, where Silent evacuation is already common, especially in care environments. Benefits of this - cuts false alarms, avoids panic, avoids moving people unless needed.

Pre-alarm notification Similar principle to the silent evacuation, this is more common in the UK in larger facilities, especially where an evacuation is last resort due to cost of disruption. - Examples

Come and say hi! We can help with Pre-alarm notification Deaf notification Silent evacuation Lockdown Thank you for listening, if you would like to find out more about anything we’ve talked about, come and see me after.

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