j's scratchpad

I started typing this while sitting in Harvard Yard, since we had another fire drill that meant my office had to evaucate the building.

My coworkers laugh at me because I usually grab my desktop computer and at least one other laptop on my way out. My office doesn’t do desktop data backups and we have no formal disaster plan, so I grab my machines. The building’s fire alarm first alerts us to an emergency in the building, then it tells us whether our floor must evacuate. (Most of the time, we don’t have to evacuate.) There is plenty of time between the first and second announcements to turn off and disconnect several machines, put my sneakers on, grab my jacket, floss my teeth, etc. It takes me less time (3 minutes) to run down the stairs with the computers than it does for the emergency alarm to go through its evacuation routine.

And I still get stuck behind slow people on the stairwell. Some woman ahead of me sauntered down the stairs, high heels in her hand. She paused at the bottom of the stairwell to put them back on, blocking everyone behind her. I just ran down the stairs with my sneakers untied.

Someone on one of the other floors pulled the stairwell door shut loudly as we came down the stairs. I could picture her holding the door closed on the other side. I noticed a big sign on another door saying access was restricted to that office’s personnel only. I wondered what these people would do in a real emergency situation if we had to leave that stairwell and traipse through their offices to find a safer passage. One time, there was an actual fire in the building and it was at the base of that stairwell. The alarm system didn’t tell us that, but luckily, my office didn’t have to evacuate that time.

I don’t like the drills. The fans in the stairwell blow the smoke up and change the air pressure such that it’s actually difficult to open the doors into the stairwell. In the evening, a gate blocks access to the stairwell close to my office. It makes me wonder how well the system would actually work if there ever was a real emergency more serious than the aforementioned kitchen fire.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 11th, 2004 at 12:18 am and is filed under News Librarianship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.