One out of every twelve fire calls turn out to be false alarms. On April 5, the fire alarm plastic cover was accidentally knocked off causing the exit next to the library to be filled with abrupt sounds.

Although the situation was not a troublesome action, purposefully causing a fire alarm to go off could have had multiple consequences. Vice principal, Mark Cook had dealt with some.

“Anything from ISS to OSS and possibly law enforcement involvement would be the punishments for a false alarm,” said Cook.

An alarm going off could be a concerning situation for anyone, so it was important for the staff to take care of it quickly.

“When an alarm, of any kind, goes off, we radio for the closest administrator or security personnel to check on it,” said Cook.

At the beginning of the year a situation similar to this one happened and it was handled with the same procedure.

“It has happened before in a P.E. class when a ball hit the cover, so the alarm in the gym went off, but fortunately not all of the alarms in the school went off,” said Cook.

When a single alarm goes off in the building, it just means there something wrong with only that alarm, such as a broken plastic cover. Some would call it a “decoy alarm”, which campus security Rick Clausing had not been through any training for.

“They don’t give us training over the decoy alarms. The other day when the alarm went off we were waiting for the entire system to go off. Since then, we’ve communicated about when you take the plastic off, it’ll go off in the quadrint. When you actually hit it’ll go off all throughout the building,” Clausing.

The process for taking care of a sounding alarm is carefully completed, with series of communicating instructions.

“The only thing I would handle is if emergency services would need to come out. So all the way up until we realized it was the cover alarm and not the actual alarm we were already working on getting emergency services here. My dispatchers knew when this was set off because they let me know on the radio, and I let them know to keep them on stand-by. Normally, this alarm immediately contacts them, so they would have known as soon as I would’ve known. Once my dispatchers came back, and had not been contacted by the alarms is when we started digging a little bit further, and realized it was just the faceplate,” said Clausing.

While it does not happen often, there have been other occasions of false alarms (both purposely and incidentally).

“It was all purely accidental and once the administrator was able to identify that the plastic just need to be replaced, the alarm stopped. Probably two minutes was spent on the whole process. This happened once in the beginning of the year and it was nefarious and they were punished” said Clausing.

Freshman principal, Jerry Edson found out that the case alarms could be easily triggered due to the pure accident that occurred.

“In the video there were just people going out to the bus and standing around. Somebody brushed up against it and knocked the case and it popped off, and it wasn’t all the way off, just any little jarring sends them off. The same thing happened in the dome when the balls hit the case it makes the case alarm go off,” said Edson.

A simple case alarm was handled just by the high school staff, if it were a real fire alarm, though, special services would need to lend a hand to reset the alarms.

“In this situation if you push the case back on it shuts that alarm off. Now if the actually fire alarm is pulled we don’t reset that. That rings until the fire department gets here, and then they have to be the ones that reset it,” said Edson.

Edson was not the only person taken by surprise when the alarm sounded, he and a few other staff members did not have knowledge of the “case alarms” either.

“I didn’t know anything about the case until that one went off and Mr. Miller was telling me about them and what happened in the dome. I just thought those were lock boxes around them that you had to smash to get into. I didn’t look at it real closely when it first went off because i just assumed it was a fire alarm and I was getting everybody out and trying to contact people to take care of it,” said Edson.

With the crowded halls in the high school it could be difficult to not accidentally bump into to someone or something, with case alarms being so easily triggered. There’s just another thing to be cautious of in the building.