Yes once again an Excellent Job by the so called " Fire Alarm Experts in Pittsburgh"
It was back in the early 80's when the Downtown Pittsburgh Investment Building experienced a fire on the 12th floor of a 21 story building and it made all the papers and TV news how the system failed to operate.
How when Office workers tried to activate pull stations they fell out of the wall and no signal came on.
How my late neighbor a City Fire Lieutenant Tom Davis carried a wheel chair bound worker down 15 floors
on his back. Luckily the building was well built with lots of concrete and steel and fire never got out of the Violin Repair shop but smoke got everywhere. Yes it was a very bad day in deed after a complete investigation it was found that even thou the city required metal encasement on all fire wiring only 3 of the floors where so encased the 3 floors the inspector looked at and all of the trunk wires etc where run down a utility shaft attached to a length of Bull Rope .
Although the Guys where cited for not doing the work properly . The reason the fire alarm did not work properly is because a maintenance man reset the fire panel from a previous false alarm and the Edwards 5700 Panel had a slide switch which did not fully slide back to its proper position and the panel did not give any indication it was not functioning properly . Needless to say after that they always had a technician to do it. I took over servicing the panel for a new owner and when they started the process to go to court over the system not working properly it was found there was problems all around including the city approving a wiring schematic that showed the wrong wiring connection
for the bells using 3 trunk lines and it was also claimed the individual who sold the owner the system parts from Edwards had stolen them from Edwards. Needless to say it was a mess and after this fire the city started to crack down on permits and inspections which they where doing a good job as till a few years ago and it is again now sliding as they have only 3 inspectors for the whole city and some Inspectors do there job exceptionally well while others do not and it is just going to be a matter of time till once again we have another tragedy. Luckily no one got seriously injured in this early 80's fire but it is going to be just a matter of time till something does go wrong in a city which I now here techs saying is going to turn into hooter ville .
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