Mark Pappler is fed up with being disturbed every time someone cooks in his on-campus apartment building.
The reason for his exasperation is the new fire alarm system installed in UNM’s student family housing units, Pappler said.
“They just put it in and set it at a very sensitive level, and when it goes off, every unit in the building where the alarm emanated from goes off simultaneously,” he said. “We have children here. One night the alarm went off and woke my daughter. She was terrified, crying and hysterical.”
Residents of the entire complex have had to evacuate the building at least 17 times since the alarms’ February installation, with seven of the evacuations in his building alone, Pappler said.
Bobby Childers, UNM housing spokesman, said the upgrade was necessary to pass the fire marshal’s inspection.
“It’s a new alarm system. It has been upgraded to provide the safety to the residents that’s needed,” he said. “We are bound to upgrade those systems to meet the state fire marshal’s inspections to pass.”
The upgraded ‘smart alarm system’ is much too sensitive, Pappler said.
“One night, the alarm went off because a woman was steam ironing a patch on somebody’s clothes,” he said. “The thing is, it’s not really smart. Last time I checked steam is H2O. How ‘smart’ does the fire alarm need to be?”
Childers said he understands Pappler’s discomfort, but said the change is ultimately for the better.
“I know it must seem frustrating,” he said. “It is for the safety and benefit of the families and the children that are there. We have to do that for the best of the whole.”
Pappler said he is irritated with the administration’s attitude toward the situation.
“It’s easy for the authorities from the state and UNM to just ignore this because the things aren’t blaring off in their house,” he said. “They promise pie in the sky and they don’t really do anything. This with the alarm system is kind of unconscionable because it is invasive to the lives of the people that live here.”
Pappler said the multiple false alarms have an additional unintended consequence.
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“It is desensitizing us to what is going on because we assume that the alarm is going off falsely,” he said. “It went off a week or so ago and I said screw it, put in my headphones and turned up the sound to drown it out. I didn’t care because I felt like it was just another false alarm, which it was.”
The sensitivity of the alarm is intended to ensure residents’ safety, said Patrick Call, director of Residence Life and Student Housing, and there will be no changes to the system.
“The system is working as it was designed,” he said. “We will definitely listen to residents’ issues and talk with them and try to make the system work the best that it can, but we are not going to, at this point in time, change the system.”
Childers said he doesn’t understand why someone would be irked about something that is designed to save lives.
“In terms of safety, if there’s a fire over there, wouldn’t you want to be notified if somebody in one of those buildings potentially has a fire next to you?” he said. “There are families and children there, a fire would impact them.”
Minimizing false alarms in the future is a priority, Call said, and he will work to educate the tenants on how to avoid it.
“I’m not going to compromise on anybody’s safety,” he said. “We can help people understand about how they cook. We have had a couple of alarms and we have gone in and talked to people about either the way that they have cooked or the cleanliness of their apartment or different things along those lines. We are trying to eliminate any inappropriate alarming.”
Still, people should not have to adjust their lifestyles to fit a gadget’s malfunctions, Pappler said.
“I am living at the pleasure of the alarm. My job in my house is to keep the alarm from going off, and personally I kind of resent that,” he said. “There is the notion that I have to change my lifestyle, the way I do things to not trip an alarm that they refuse to adjust.”
