02/05/2006: Fire Alarm at Nursing Home
At 1600 hours on Super Bowl Sunday, the MFD was paged to a general fire alarm at the nursing home. My first thought was that I hoped it wasn't a real fire. My second thought was that I hoped this call would not take too long because the Steelers were about to play in the big game!
On the way to the fire hall, the sheriff came over the radio and informed us that the nursing home was requesting a limited response, so we responded with one engine and one support vehicle.
Upon arrival at the nursing home, the firefighters were directed to the laundry room where a battery charger for a floor buffer smelled hot. It looked like the problem had been found, but the maintencance crew at the nursing home couldn't get the alarm system to reset so the alarm kept going off.
We checked everything in the vacinity of the offending battery charger, checked the walls and ceiling with the thermal imaging camera, and sniffed around like a pack of hounds trying to find the source of the problem.
Well, needless to say, we were guilty of tunnel vision. The alarm zone that was going off was for the entire east wing. After looking through the east wing closely, we found a pull station that had been pulled. After the pull station was reset, the alarm reset just fine.
I even made it back home in plenty of time to catch the start of the game.
