Sunday, May 24, 2009
False Alarm
Last night at 3 am our smoke alarm starts going off. I woke up and jumped out of bed and began to yell at Neil's. I run to the kids and try to smell smoke but there was none. I go downstairs and no sign of a fire. I ran back upstairs and told Neil to check the basement. He didn't come back up so I began to panic thinking it was a trick and there was an intruder who had Neil hostage and I began to run around my bathroom looking for a weapon and thinking how would I defend myself and keep my kids safe. I was shaking and didn't know if I could stand. Neil finally came back up and no sign of smoke. I had a hard time settling down with all the thoughts racing through my head as I just thought my house was on fire. Conner came and slept in our bed so I slept in his. We all went back asleep just to have the alarm go off again. It went off for about 10 seconds and then stopped. Neil was watching it and it looked like there was a bug going in and out of it. I don't know if that set it off but that was quite a fright. One thing that I learned is that all 3 kids slept through the alarm and never woke up. Now that's scary. I don't see how because it was so loud I woke up instantaneously. I'm definitely going to work on an escape plan if we ever need to use it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
We had that happen several times here too. Never any smoke or fire. We have the smoke alarms that are connected to the electricity and it was bazaar that they all went off together randomly in the night, never did figure out what caused it, it happened several times and always in the middle of the night. My kids all slept through them as well, kids must really be out! For a while we had one alarm that constantly "chirped", this went on for months, then Ray finally bought a new one and we have had no problems since. The hard thing is that you have to go check the whole house making sure there is no fire. Hope it doesn't happen again!
There are smoke alarms that use a voice recording as the alarm instead of a high-pitched beep. I remember seeing a tv report about it. Regular smoke alarms were tested on sleeping families (with them knowing it was going to happen in some time frame but no specific date), and people didn't wake up. The alarms with the voice telling people to wake up because there was a fire woke people up because they recognized the voice and because it was loud.
I wasn't sure if that was really true, but your experience tells me it is. That is scary thinking what's intended to protect you might not wake you up.
I'm glad it was a false alarm.
Post a Comment