Colorado shooting - fire alarm

[G. Morgan]

I wrote this in another group, but I'd like your opinions. Someone here
may actually be in a position to get at the event logs.

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I've serviced fire alarms in big cinemas like that. The protocol is
pretty complex. Once smoke is detected anywhere in the building *all*
of the projectors shut down, the RTU's are shut off, house lights come
on full brightness, emergency exit signs flash, elevators recall & lock
open, and a coded message - "the siren tone" with voice egress
directions are announced on all speakers. We spend a lot of effort to
make all that happen.

I want to know why the fire alarm didn't do that.

 

[Bob La Londe]

I don't know about Colorado regulations, but it seems to me from some of
the news reports I heard that the fire alarm wasn't used, but some sort of
mass notification was instead. The alert was telling people to flee the
shooter, but people were leaving the same way each had entered in the
first place and that is where the shooter was picking them off. Someone
said that a jam in the weapon prevented a lot more deaths.
As far as the fire alarm goes, most theaters are manual evacuation with
the air handlers tied in for good measure. In many jurisdictions the air
handler detector must simply shut down the air handler itself and generate
a trouble condition on the panel and not a general alarm.

Given the number of falses from duct detectors that would make sense. Been
a while since I did a fire alarm, but none of those I did were setup that
way.