Watch Lee Kaiser speak about emergency communications in building fire systems. In the video excerpt below, you can watch as he introduces us to voice evacuation and mass notification systems and the signaling strategies used for them.
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Transcript
So let's get started. We're going to talk about emergency communication systems, specifically voice alarm systems and a little bit about mass notification systems. And to tee that up, one of the messages I want to try and convey this morning is, let's think about the need for effective emergency communications….
The first and second severe weather emergencies…certainly things that we worry about here. Before I moved to Kentucky, I never realized how many tornadoes we actually have here in this area, and that's been an issue for us. And the middle one, the active shooter incident, you know, certainly a place where if you can let the people know about what's going on, on that college campus, you know, you can potentially save some lives.
How do we do that? Well, with our fire alarm systems, that piece of our fire alarm system that would deal with that, would be the notification piece. So, let's talk about fire alarm system notification. Certainly when I think about fire alarm systems, I think of them in two halves, you know, the detection piece and then the notification piece. So let's zero on notification.
Inside of our building—most of the time—the noisemakers and the light flashers, the horn strobes are the things that signal the evacuation of our building to tell people to get out of the building in case there is a fire. And so, most of the time we're telling people to evacuate, but that's not the only option that we have. Sometimes we tell people to move to a safe location. Some buildings are arranged in that way and we can use our notification devices to do that. Sometimes we'll tell people to shelter-in-place, and that's pretty typical for healthcare facilities where we have a shelter-in-place strategy for residents or people inside of hospitals so that that the patients that can't exit the building themselves, the nursing staff, the hospital staff are going to help in that emergency and, and maybe shut the doors to isolate people in the rooms if they can't exit. They're going to certainly, evacuate the people closest to the incident. And, at some point, they're going to rely on the features of the fire protection system to deal with the incident, you know, the sprinkler system, the firewall, the smoke walls, until the fire department can get there and put the fire out. So, that shelter-in-place is pretty typical for healthcare facilities. And avoiding an area, so certainly another thing that we can do, we can signal people to avoid a certain area because of a given emergency condition.
This is the first video in our Emergency Communications video series.
You can also watch our previous series on Trending Technology Clean Agent Systems and on Dialer and Communicator Technology Changes at the links below.
Trending Technology Clean Agent Systems:
- Part 1: What Are Clean Agent Fire Suppression Systems?
- Part 2: Are Fire Suppression Clean Agents Safe for People?
- Part 3: Common Applications of Clean Agent Systems
- Part 4: Types of Clean Agent Gases
- Part 5: How Do Clean Agent Systems Work?
- Part 6: New Technology in High Pressure Fire Suppression Systems
- Part 7: Trending Options for Localized Fire Suppression
- Part 8: Localized Fire Suppression Case Study CNC Machine
- Part 9: In Cabinet Fire Suppression Technology
Dialer and Communicator Technology Changes:
- Part 1: Off-Premise Signaling
- Part 2: History of the Network
- Part 3: NFPA Requirements
- Part 4: Radio DACTs Cellular & IP
- Part 5: What Type of Dialer?
