Remember: Fire BAD

I am tasked with investigating why a fire was allowed to do so much damage to the basement level of a building when it could have been mitigated. The site had four security guards onsite at the time that the fire broke out, but according to the accounts of people in the building at the time, they didn’t exactly do anything.

The fire was in an electrical room in the basement garage of the structure, which was covered by two cameras. The fire could have been extinguished by our security staff when it was still small instead of being allowed to run rampant.

The building manager and I go to the security control room and start looking at the cameras.

Within seconds of breaking out, the fire is visible and obvious on one of the two cameras, but the camera viewing the security control room itself shows no reaction from the guards onsite.

Time passes and the fire gets bigger, smoke starts to filter into the building from stairwells, and one camera has turned into a bright orange rectangle on the monitors.

There’s still no reaction from the guards on duty, but people within the building are starting to take notice now, and panic is setting in. It isn’t until someone hammers on the window of the control center that the guards react. They are informed of the fire by a tenant of the building just as the strobes start to flash. We watch, in utter disbelief, as the guards start walking casually to the basement. To make matters worse, they don’t take the fastest route; they end up going a longer way so they can take the elevator instead of using the stairs.

Now the sprinkler system has gone off, flooding the basement.

I turn the cameras off. What could have been a minor event turned into thousands of dollars worth of damage because the on-duty officers were not paying attention and seemingly did not care about what was happening. They didn’t even call for a building evacuation. People could have been hurt or killed. 

All four guards are terminated on the spot. The owner of the building makes the call to terminate the supervisor, as well, because he doesn’t trust him anymore after seeing how well his people were trained. 

We all believe that the fire alarms and strobes should have triggered faster, and that is being fixed; however, we have physical security on the site for a reason, and the failure of building safety systems is one of those reasons. When automation fails, you are always supposed to be able to depend on those who are on-site with their boots on the ground. 

Not this time.