For the last month we have been running on a nuisance false alarm at a manufacturing warehouse in our district. Our shift alone has gone there ten times this month. The worst part about it for us is that we usually get the calls at about 9pm, 11pm, 1am, and 3am. And that's in the same shift. Spaced just perfectly enough to allow for almost zero sleep.
The place is open with workers inside until between 2-3am so at least there is usually someone there to let us in. We go in, we silence the alarm and reset the system and go back to the station. After 3am there is a security guard who sits in his personal car in the parking lot watching the building. He does not, however, have access to the building (I don't know if he even has a radio) and there is no fire department lock box for us.
It is only because we know this is a false alarm and that we are trying not to make the situation worse that we have not broken the door down when we go there after 3am. Nothing gets a business owners attention and lights a fire under them (so to speak) like property damage.
After our first call of the tour to this business we contacted the alarm company ourselves and were told that they required someone on the official contact list with a password to take the alarm offline. No one working in the plant had this info. The fire alarm rep was very honest in explaining that he was not surprised they had not received a repair order since that costs money and we were resetting the alarm for free. Unfortunately we can't just not go to the alarm so we decided that this would be the day that we break in if no one was there to let us in. The captain also sent the info off to Fire Prevention so the business would start being fined every time we went out there. We were done messing around.
We got our second call of the shift to the business around 9pm and we were silencing the alarm with our usual contact, the floor production manager, when a stern looking man with a clipboard and a camera appeared from the warehouse and followed us to the alarm panel.
He stated that he was the corporate safety inspector and just happened to be down here from Kansas City doing an audit of the facility. Without prompting, he informed us that, in his words, "They're failing by the way. This place is a shithole." We told him the whole saga of the month long alarms and he was not a happy camper. No one outside of the plant had been informed and he was pretty upset that this was the first he was hearing of it. He told us he would be calling corporate right away. Considering it would be 1am where he was calling I got the feeling he was going to get some attention and some action. He asked if he could get a picture of us as proof that we were here. I though it odd that they wouldn't believe him but we obliged and he snapped a picture of our big smiling crew with the floor manager.
We haven't been back since.
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