System Design Delivers Significant Control
To effectively control the fire alarm system in a complex the size of St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center, facilities personnel need more than a simple fire annunciator located at a single point of entry — a common requirement made by most local fire officials. Instead, an effective user interface is necessary to enable security and safety personnel to competently deal with any emergency situation that may arise.

An intelligent network command center serves as the interface between operator and fire alarm system. Functions covered by such a command center include zone bypass, general command and control functions, speaker selection, phone circuits and more. St. Joseph’s network contains eight command centers in total.

“The system is set up for horizontal evacuation and is programmed using positive non-interfering sequential encoding,” states Simpson. “The amazing thing is that the system itself does not have one location for the voice messages. The voice messaging is shared throughout the network. And to be able to pull those messages from all these locations to assure system survival is amazing.”

In a large complex like St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center, it is critical that the life safety system direct people to respond appropriately, depending on the emergency situation. For this reason, a single, general evacuation message will not work.

Containing 94 custom voice codes, the hospital’s system is designed to alert only certain areas when evacuation is required. It also complies with NFPA 72 for partial evacuation system survivability.

The design of such a state-of-the-art system took skilled fire protection engineering and an in-depth understanding of fire network technology. Fortunately, the configuration software is flexible enough to pull all of the various hardware, electronics and functionality together.

Part of this effort included making good use of the configuration software’s Boolean logic feature. Dick Aldrich, Gamewell-FCI project engineer and Mike Riggin, ST&A’s vice president of service operations and a NICET Level III certified electrical technician, worked together, brainstorming code to ensure the system operated properly and all command centers functioned as specified.

Given his knowledge of the facility’s day-to-day operations, Riggin built in numerous service bypasses and special use functions. Most importantly, the system allowed him to create diagnostic views for pre-testing.

“I knew we would have problems scheduling real alarm tests because this is a hospital,” he says. “I also knew the system would work during acceptance testing, because this software allowed me to view real alarm test events without bothering anyone.”

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