Smoke Detector Headaches

 Here is a puzzle for you. What do you do if it's 3am, your smoke detectors go off, and after verifying that there is no smoke or fire anywhere, it just keeps sounding. You're on a wired system so that if any of your 3 goes off, or any of the 6 downstairs, then ALL of them sound. The way the walls are in your place, resonance increases the volume. Some of these are 12 feet up in the air, and you have no stepladder and besides that have a balance problem that would mean you can't get safely to the ones that are only 9 feet up. What do you do?

Somehow I don't think a call to 911 would be appreciated, unless maybe I could innocently claim I didn't know if there was a fire or not. Do I just put a pillow over your head and wait out the night -- maybe 5 hours? Expecting landlord service at 3am seems a bit much.

In fact, I got out of my problem because of a hale young couple that lives on the first floor. The alarm was loud enough to wake them up too, though it wasn't in their unit. And the man came up with his stepladder and disconnected all 9 of them. Piece of cake.

It is not one of the world's top 30 problems, but I am thoroughly convinced that our regulations and standards about smoke detectors have gone way too far.

Not that many people died in fires to begin with. It's great that the smoke detectors can save them -- though only some of them. You put one smoke detector in each apartment-size unit, and it will do 95% of the job that needs to be done.

Someone somewhere was so deaf or so drunk that they didn't wake up to the sounds of a very loud alarm, so it must be made ear-splittingly loud. Somewhere there was a fire in one unit, but those nearby were similarly deaf or drunk and missed it, so the solution was to wire all of them together.

Just today as the landlord was installing replacements, I read the warning, "must be tested weekly". Really? This issue is so vital that the best the industry can do is a product that requires a weekly testing? You've got to be kidding! Or perhaps it is just ass-covering and no one will test them weekly. Whatever.

I have a hunch this is an example of "policy by extraordinary anecdote". Something makes the news -- in part because it's very rare -- and so something must be done about it. There was a fire, and six children died. Terrible, terrible tragedy. To fix a recurrence of this problem, you create problems for another 999 people who don't make the news but live with the headaches. Or perhaps it's 999,999.

There's also the tendency for specialists to view the world through the lens of their own experience. I have a friend who was an Emergency Room doctor for many years, and he recognizes that in his gut he feels like driving cars is an extremely dangerous thing to do. So now on this issue we consult the experts on fire protection -- firefighters and their bosses. Salient in their minds are what happens in fires -- tragedies, or near-tragedies that were barely averted. For every fire, there are hundreds or thousands of people who never have life-threatening fires but instead deal with the alarm going off if they burn the toast. They are nowhere on the radar screen of the people who set smoke detector policies.

Presumably there is also now an industry of the producers of smoke detector equipment, and they have an interest in regulations that let them sell more of their product.

I told my landlady that I would be delighted if she procrastinated in installing new detectors, and even if she never got around to it, but no... new ones were installed today. And part of me is on edge waiting for the next time they go off, perhaps because the people downstairs burn their toast.