First, two stories:

One: When I was about 10 or 11 I was hired for a paper route. The papers needed to be delivered before school so I needed to be up by about 4:00 am. The first day of the route a really loud buzzing woke me from my sleep, and since the noise was not familiar to me I just assumed it was our smoke detector. I figured my dad would attend it and rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. Of course, a few minutes later the buzzer had not stopped and my dad was shaking me awake. It was my alarm clock. Because I had never heard the sound of the alarm, I didn’t react in the way intended (namely getting my butt out of bed).

Two: My workplace is not lacking in alarms. We have alarms on doors, windows, beds, and hallways as well as fire and safety alarms. Last night I was finishing up some documentation and heard an alarm going off somewhere in the house. Unfortunately it took me nearly 30 seconds to register which alarm I was hearing. I did finally head toward the window alarm that was going off, but had it been an emergency I would have lost valuable time figuring out which way to respond.

(Three? While I was writing this post a woman was telling my wife a story about how she mistakenly thought there was a large truck backing up somewhere in the neighborhood. It turns out that the beeping she heard was a smoke detector in her kitchen that was alerting her to a burning roast in the oven. Thankfully she did recognise the alarm before her kitchen caught fire.)

Today’s safety systems are increasingly effective. In the home we have smoke and heat detectors, carbonmonoxide detectors, security systems and even baby and child alert devices. Your workplace probably has more advanced fire and smoke alarms, security systems and a multitude of other alerts and emergency devices. Unfortunetly everything has some sort of noise or audio alarm built into it. Sound is a great way to get our attention, but if we don’t know which device is shouting at us, we lose valuable time trying to determine the correct response.

Maybe we need drills just to train our brains to recognise the sound of each alarm. Most safety devices and detectors have a “test” feature. We need to all familiarize ourselves with the noise each of our alarms make. Go around the house with your family and run a sound memory drill. Turn it into a game with the kids. Do an alarm quiz. At work ask your employer (or your employees) to take a few minutes and purposely set off each alarm around the building so you can better remember the sound of each alarm.

Knowing the sound of your alarms will increase your response time. You will gain valuable time in an emergency if your brain quickly registers which alarm is going off and how you need to react.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.  

z.

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Tags: alarms, emergency, fire alarms, preparedness, safety devices, smoke detectors