Bob Armstrong (University of Nottingham - Fire Safety Advisor), shares his knowledge and experiences:
There's two types of fire alarms, we have got the detection - automatic detection, which will very often pick-up most of our fires.
It is unusual you'll discover a fire, because the detection has already beaten you to it, but there are parts of certain buildings that won't have any detection and that's where you will find a fire - eventually, if you stay long enough I suppose?
So if you are operating the manual call system, with the best of intentions. ie. you think there is a fire, you suspect there is a fire, so you have got the smell of burning. It is a smell that you have never had in that area before, you can see smoke even though you can't see flames, call Security via the University emergency number for University premises, or the hospital emergency number if in the Nottingham University Hospital NHS trust premises, nobody will be taking action against you as an individual, because you are acting in the best of intentions.
But on the other hand, if you are acting maliciously, then you will er, hopefully get caught. Well we don't want people like that operating the alarm maliciously, we do actually have very few malicious calls which is really good given the cross section of personnel and people we have got in our University campus and our University society, because er there could be people who are malicious, people who like to play with fire, and people who just like to see fire engines.
If it is on any other campuses other than the Medical school, the emergency number is 8888 and pass the same information.
Please Note: Check the local procedures section at the end of this resource to access the correct number to call for the building where a fire has been located.
