It was February of my sophomore year when I woke up to a blaring noise. The Harleston Hall fire alarms were going off at 2 a.m. My roommate and I sluggishly put on our coats and begrudgingly left our abode. As we walked outside into the freezing winter air, we noticed a significant lack of urgency. No one who was walking outside with us believed that there was an actual fire. Some people even remained behind in their dorms, putting pillows over their heads to suppress the noise while they waited for the inevitable false alarm announcement. Suffice to say, if there was an actual fire, we’d be in serious trouble.
As of today, 98% of the times fire alarms go off are false alarms. 90% of these false alarms are due to issues with the fire alarm itself. In 2018 alone, fire departments across the country responded to 2,889,000 false alarms. The cost of responding to these false alarms isn’t cheap either. The Center for Problem-Oriented Policing estimates that responding to false alarms costs emergency services around $1.8 billion every year.
In my experience, almost no one takes fire alarms seriously. There are so many false alarms that the possibility of a fire alarm designating an actual fire seems laughable. Sometimes, when fire alarms go off, people simply choose not to respond. Nearly one out of every ten home fire fatalities (where fire alarms are present) are due to residents not responding to the alarms. It’s possible that more people leave the building due to the loud, annoying noise of the alarm rather than the possibility of an actual emergency. To be fair, this is intentional. Alarms are meant to startle people into action — if they were quieter, people would take them even less seriously. Especially in residential buildings, alarms must be loud and sharp enough to wake someone from a deep slumber.
For a long time, I’ve wanted to rip the fire alarms out of my house. They’re annoying, highly inaccurate and can possibly even damage hearing. But that 2% chance of an actual fire has held me back. Having functional fire alarms in one’s home reduces the chance of dying from a house fire by 60%, according to the NFPA. However, even in situations where fire alarms are present, they don’t always work: 16% of all home fire fatalities are due to dysfunctional alarm systems.
Clearly, something needs to change. We need to make fire alarms more accurate, and we need people to take fire alarms more seriously. Fortunately, solving the first problem will likely fix the latter. The sheer amount of false alarms leads to a “boy-who-cried-wolf” situation. If fire alarms only go off in the event of an actual fire, people will associate the alarms with an emergency situation, not an annoying, meaningless noise.
So, how can we reduce false alarms? Some of it comes down to routine maintenance and tests, but let’s be honest — no one does that. In my opinion, the most effective strategy would be to improve the fire alarms themselves. Smarter, less faulty fire alarms exist, they’re just more expensive. Especially in homes or apartments designed to be rented out, landlords have no incentive to opt for a more expensive system.
However, these smarter fire alarms are significantly better. Typical fire alarms can often only detect smoke. These detectors can easily be set off by dust, steam or other airborne particles. Smarter fire alarms typically consist of multi-sensor systems, which detect a combination of smoke, heat and gas. New advances in AI and machine learning allow smart fire alarms to use pattern recognition to identify when there is a real fire — significantly cutting down the number of false positives. Oftentimes these systems use lithium batteries or an external power source meaning they last much longer too.
Like most appliances, a greater upfront cost typically means saving more in the long run. Smarter fire alarms are more expensive, yes, but the cost of replacing cheap alarms and their batteries adds up. Smarter detection systems mean that when the alarm goes off, you can be much more confident that there is an actual emergency. If we make these smarter systems a national standard, the public perception of fire alarms may shift from an unreliable nuisance to a life-saving tool.
