“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 future expansions,” says Nelson.

Sprawling Dallas VA Solution Spans 40 Buildings

The Dallas VA Medical Center covers 84 acres just south of downtown Dallas and serves as the referral center for the VA North Texas Health Care System. According to Johnny Stacy, sales manager with local fire and security integrator SSD Systems, the Dallas facility, which employs more than 4,500 people and is the second-largest VA in the nation in terms of workload, plans to expand in the next few years.

“The history and reliability of NOTIFIER and its distributor network were the big selling points on the project,” says Stacy, ” … and of course, the flexibility of the digital voice command system for mass notification.”

SSD Systems installed fiber-optic cable across the campus, connecting 13 NFS2-3030 FACPs with high-speed network cards. These panels protect 40 buildings containing in excess of two million square feet of space. DVC stations were installed in all panels to facilitate fire and emergency messaging. Three ONYXWorks workstations provide the master control and monitoring the facility requires.

Like the other VA hospitals, officials in Dallas wanted to be able to pick up a microphone at one of the workstations and talk to any building. The NOTIFIER systems allow building-specific or entire campus announcements. SSD configured the NFS2-3030 panels for individualized messages and as needed, customizable emergency events.

“If there is a tornado, for instance, the system can announce a different message than a fire emergency and amber-colored ‘Alert’ strobes would be used for that event. Obviously if it’s a tornado, you don’t want them going outside,” says Stacy.

For Stacy, working on a project that will keep veterans safe is especially meaningful. His father, a World War II vet, was in the transitional care facility at the Dallas VA Medical Center for some time.

“To get them a dependable system that works … I’m very humbled by it,” he says.

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