Fire trucks screaming down the street is a sound the residents around Sacred Heart Medical Center hear on a regular basis, and hospital and fire department officials say that’s not going to change anytime soon.
Deputy Fire Marshal Reggie Augsburger said the fire department received approximately five false alarm calls per week from Sacred Heart during February and March, when the hospital renovated a large part of its first floor.
After consulting response logs, Augsburger said that they’ve only received a couple since then, but other officials dispute this.
Jim Weston, director of Facilities Management for the hospital, said alarms are often triggered by events other than actual fires.
“It’s my impression that they go off about once a week,” he said, adding that the hospital manages to contact the fire department about the false alarm before they send trucks about half the time.
Each fire alarm is thoroughly investigated by the hospital’s facilities staff and 24-hour security.
“Some of the incidents are certainly preventable, but others are beyond our control,” Weston said.
Weston said that frequent construction projects are to blame for the errant alarms and every effort is made by the hospital staff to contact the fire department before trucks leave the station. The alarm system automatically notifies the fire department when it is triggered.
He said the thousands of detectors are pulled and cleaned monthly, but the dust and debris that activates most of the alarms are unavoidable side effects of the construction.
A few times, alarms have been traced to hospital staff burning popcorn in the microwaves.
“We’re trying to cut down on that,” he said.
Jim Matthews, fire chief for the district that includes the hospital, said that every time they are called out to the hospital their team includes three pump trucks, two ladder trucks, the fire chief and a medical team.
“Because of the size of the structure and the fact that a lot of people in the building can’t save themselves, that kind of response is necessary,” he said.
The main hospital building is 680,000 square feet, and the smaller Oregon Medical Laboratory measures 32,000 square feet.
Matthews said that other large buildings, such as the downtown U.S. Bank tower, have similar problems with false alarms because of the complexity of fire control systems and large numbers of detectors.