Protecting Those Who Protect America
The welfare of patients, medical personnel and staff are a top priority for any hospital but perhaps even more so where it concerns the brave and honorable men and women who have served and sacrificed to keep America free. Multiple VA hospital case studies show how advanced fire/life-safety systems are providing safe haven for veterans.
Opening photo ©iStockphoto.com/Kriss Russell.
All other photos courtesy NOTIFIER.
Addressability Answers Albany Stratton VA’s False Alarms
New York’s Albany Stratton VA Medical Center was a similar retrofit of a 20-year-old system that was rife with false alarms. The main hospital is 16 floors connected with a number of nearby ancillary buildings, all networked together. About 32,000 vets use the hospital each year.
Originally protected by a zoned system, operators had a hard time identifying the exact location of alarms. Brad Nelson, project engineer and senior technician with Alarm & Suppression Inc., provided an addressable network from NOTIFIER, offering absolute control over the entire system’s fire-safety data.
“Their old system was not very adequate in that department,” he says. “They’ve had problems in the past where they weren’t able to locate an alarm on an existing zone — with patient safety involved, they really needed a system that would eliminate that.”
Alarm & Suppression and electrical contractor Clifford R. Gray Inc. installed two ONYXWorks workstations, three DVCs, 13 NFS2-640 FACPs, five NFS-320 panels and two network annunciators, all on a fiber network carrying digital audio loops and the fire alarm network.
Making it easy to allow for facility maintenance, Nelson also created customized commands in the ONYXWorks system. “I’ve set up macros for them. With one click of a button, they can disable all the strobes, all the elevator recalls, fan shutdowns, etc.”
The system also includes 68 digital audio amplifiers to allow for separate, zoned voice communications. As in the Grand Junction case, when an alarm goes off in one part of a building, that zone gets an individual message.
“They’ve got a very specific voice evacuation plan, where only in the smoke zone in alarm does it activate strobes and an audible alert, too. The rest of the floor and the rest of the hospital get a different announcement,” says Nelson.
With surgical units contained within, Nelson’s group took extra precautions during installation and testing.
“False alarms were a big deal. Obviously, when we were installing and bringing up a floor, we had to make sure that the work we did was rock-solid and we didn’t accidentally cause a huge chain of events to happen,” he says.
According to Nelson, the ease of setting up the points in the field was valuable to the project. With the smoke detectors, pull stations and other initiating devices being addressable, contractors could follow the integrator’s plans and install each device without having to fool with the usual dipswitches or barcodes.
As was the case with Grand Junction’s VA, Albany’s fire protection system had to be easy to expand with enough capacity to support any additions. “They wanted something that was easy to add on to and had a lot of room for fu
ture expansions,” says Nelson.
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