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04/07/2004 Archived Entry: "False Alarm"

Today at my work we had a false fire alarm in the early afternoon. The alarm went off with accompanying strobes in a couple of the parking garage levels and the food court. Fortunately the engineers got word to me that the alarm was false within a few seconds, so I could call the alarm company and tell them not to send fire trucks.

After the fire system was reset, and all was calm again, I decided to review the video feeds to see how much of a disturbance this caused in the food court. See the footage was really interesting. We don't have an audio feed, so I don't hear the alarm on playback, and since the frame rate is only about 5 fps and the strobes flash only about 1/2000 of a second every few seconds, the strobes are rarely captured on video. So I just had the people's behavior to indicate the alarm going off. The interesting thing was there really wasn't a response from anyone. It looked like any other lunch hour in the food court. I guess we get pretty numb to alarms here in the city, or maybe we just don't like to get distracted from our food.

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