Because of this, I discovered that (apparently) NY Fire Department charges $5000 per false call on an alarm system directly connected to the dispatch system.
Somethng to think about.
Honestly it's remarkable to me to think that anyone ever gets to that $500 "excessive" tier, I've had one false alarm where the fire department attended in years of having an alarm system and I was mortified. felt like the biggest idiot in the world.
https://www.nfpa.org/news-blogs-and-articles/blogs/2023/03/0...
I wouldn't think code dictated the alarm type. (I just replaced all nine sensors in my home due to age and went with all photoelectric this time and it was less than six months before I had my first false alarm. Never had any false alarms with previous ionizing type.)
We once got an alarm because the heating element in a computer room air conditioner had turned on for the first time ever. It was defective and started to smoke. Smoke detection tripped, buzzers sounded, lights on a panel showed where the problem was, and alarms went off in the security control center. But this didn't trigger building evacuation or full power down. That took confirmation from a second sensor.
Someone ran into that computer room, saw smoke coming from the A/C unit, and pulled the big red power switch, installed by the safety people, on the air conditioner. Then we had time to shut down normally, the safety people came to clear the alarm, and the HVAC people came to fix the problem. I kept the burnt heating element on my desk for a few days for people to see.
This is typical for big industrial plants. Bad stuff will happen, and you have procedures for it.
Not true for all places. There are places where the callee can be charged for the costs of a call and the owner of the building has to pay the firefighters (well, his mandatory government-issued insurance will pay). It's moving bills from one stack to another, but it's not free as in beer.
You never want to supply any reason for someone to demur about reporting a fire.
> Healthcare: The constant sounds of alarms and noises from blood pressure machines, ventilators and heart monitors
> Amber Alerts: sent to cell phones as far away as [...] 15 hour drive
> "known to the state of California to cause cancer"
etc
https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB
See also a million USCSB industrial disaster postmortems
Should probably be: "known to the state of California to be a class N carcinogen"
I prefer to risk my life every day at not knowing what the government thinks is really important for me to know.
I was interested to find a discussion of the trolley problem in a book of out-of-copyright Norwegian-region folk tales (in English translation) that Amazon recommended.
Guess whats the consequence of that? Less and less people pay attention to the alerts.
Government officials are terrified of taking the blame for another Valencia style flooding catastrophe so any hint of rain blasts the mobile phone emergency system. Once the alert has been sent the officials can feel safe in the knowledge that they've done something.
But yeah, this is after the "EVERYBODY IS ABOUT THE DIE" sound alarm that triggers on everyone's phone at the same time, then you get see that they're warning about an orange weather warning, or something like that.
Is it ideal? Not really, but better than nothing. In Maresme-area we have serious flood-risk almost every time it rains, as it fucking pours when it rains, and the warnings seemingly actually save lives today.
How can you even claim infrastructure is not bad in our country?
fix the alarms? I only had one false fire alarm in my life. and thankfully zero real ones. it's possible.
do fire drills? if alarms get ignored, and you can't reduce the false-positive rate, then introduce fake alarms and monitor the response?
(...on track)
If ignoring an alarm and keeping it on track "counts" as having kept things on track, there's the perverse incentive. Change incentive to mean a train kept on track after ignoring an false alarm was worse than a late train.
Now the company is as focused, or more, on fixing the bad alarms, than keeping trains on time.
Finding incorrect incentives is usually not that hard.
This literally happened to me last night, I was having dinner at my apartment, and suddenly I start hearing a smoke alarm, but not quite inside the apartment, I just kept having dinner thinking "bah, someone probably burned a toast".
Then it wont stop, I walk to door and hear people talking, still don't bother enough, wait a few minutes, then go out and my neighbor said "there are three fire trucks down there, I think it's a real one" hahhaha
The hallway was kind of hazy and smelled like burnt food, for sure... so I just grabbed my laptop and went out hahaa.
The building fire alarm is soooo loud and obnoxious, you _want_ to leave the building at speed. (Which I think is the right way to do it.)
Safety culture is blameless, but only if everyone plays along.
I know that this was likely a typo, but it is also a genuinely great word for the sort of attitude related to these situations.
What I'm saying is: false positives should not be ignorable, and modern systems take that choice away (at least, just before the situation becomes unavoidable in worst-case analyses).
That being said, previous fatal accidents in Spain's high-speed rail have resulted in "primitive" uncontrolled areas between controlled areas. Those SHOULD NOT exist. You are essentially saying "lives don't matter that much here " ($/life).
[0] I work in rail safety.