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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (May 23, 2000)
False fire alerts inundate hospital at alarming rate ■ Fire alarms at Sacred Heart are often triggered by dust and debris from construction projects By Josh Ryneal Oregon Daily Emerald Fire trucks screaming down the street is a sound the residents around Sacred Heart Medical Center hear on a regular basis, and hospital and fire department officials say that’s not going to change anytime soon. Deputy Fire Marshal Reggie Augsburger said the fire depart ment received approximately five false alarm calls per week from Sacred Heart during Febru ary and March, when the hospi tal renovated a large part of its first floor. After consulting response logs, Augsburger said that they’ve only received a couple since then, but other officials dispute this. Jim Weston, director of Facili ties Management for the hospital, said alarms are often triggered by events other than actual fires. “It’s my impression that they go off about once a week,” he said, adding that the hospital manages to contact the fire de partment about the false alarm before they send trucks about half the time. Each fire alarm is thoroughly investigated by the hospital’s fa cilities staff and 24-hour security. “Some of the incidents are cer tainly preventable, but others are beyond our control,” Weston said. Weston said that frequent con struction projects are to blame for the errant alarms and every effort is made by the hospital staff to contact the fire department be fore trucks leave the station. The alarm system automatically noti fies the fire department when it is triggered. He said the thousands of detec tors are pulled and cleaned monthly, but the dust and debris that activates most of the alarms are unavoidable side effects of the construction. A few times, alarms have been traced to hospital staff burning popcorn in the microwaves. “We’re trying to cut down on that,” he said. Jim Matthews, fire chief for the district that includes the hospital, said that every time they are called out to the hospital their team includes three pump trucks, two ladder trucks, the fire chief and a medical team. “Because of the size of the structure and the fact that a lot of people in the building can’t save themselves, that kind of response is necessary,” he said. The main hospital building is 680,000 square feet, and the smaller Oregon Medical Labora tory measures 32,000 square feet. Matthews said that other large buildings, such as the downtown U.S. Bank tower, have similar problems with false alarms be cause of the complexity of fire control systems and large num bers of detectors. Become a Peer Health Educator Develop Valuable Skills for Future Career Organize and present health workshops & theater Publish in the WellNow—the Health Center’s newsletter Refine your communication skills Strengthen your resume through experience Explore Hot Topics in College Healtb Sex—Exercise—Drugs—Food—Stress—& More! | Help Others Use your knowledge and skills to make a difference in the lives of other college students I Develop Relationships with Health Professionals at I the UO Health Center! | ! Two Term Commitment | ELIA 407 (4 credits) Class Meets Tuesday and Thursday 9:30-10:50 am Pick up an application at the Peer Health Education Office in | the Health Center, online at healthed.uoregon.edu, or call I1 346-4456 for more information. Pre-authorization is required! UNIVERSITY HEALTH CENTER We’re a matter of degrees ^ Open daily 8 mm. to 6 pjn., except Tuesdays (9 un.) and Sundays (10 a-m.). Appointments and after hours: 346-2770 • Web: http://healthed.uoregoo.edu Get results with Oregon Daily Emerald Classifieps!3>I6',I313 Ryan Starkweather Emerald Because of the failure of Eugene Ballot Measure 20-31, the Eugene police station, located in City Hall, was denied funding for the construction of a new facility. Stations continued from page 1 not supportive of citywide meas ures because of their pride in their area,” he said. “If you look at the returns, I bet you that will be an area where we lost heavily.” Torrey also said that the fire fighters’ union told him that they would not support the measure, but were unclear about their rea sons. Options open to supporters of the plan to provide the depart ments with new quarters include putting only the fire or police de partment funding on the ballot or simply using existing funds to renovate the downtown fire de partment. “There were some city coun cilors who wanted to only put the fire department on the ballot, but I’m not willing to support a fire-only measure,” Torrey said. The measure’s slim margin of failure has spurred the City Council into commissioning a survey to discover why the meas ure failed and to help revamp the measure and present it again in the November general election. City Councilor David Kelly said that the survey, done by an independent polling firm, is only the first step in determining why the measure was spurned by Eu gene voters. “We want to get a sense of why supporters were supportive and why opponents opposed it,” he said. Kelly said that he thought peo ple were opposed to the measure for a number of different reasons, ranging from lack of specificity in the proposal to outright dis like of the police department. He called the idea of abandon ing the measure “highly unlike ly,” and said that as part of the committee that drafted the meas ure, it was well researched and planned out. Space is at a premium at both downtown stations. The police department currently occupies much of the basement of City Hall, and more and more impor tant operations are being placed in a space not designed for them. Rick Siel, a lieutenant at the downtown police station, said that when he first arrived on the force, the only thing in the base ment was a shooting range. “It’s not designed for people,” he said. “But now we have our entire patrol force housed there, along with archives and things like uniform storage — a lot of critical operations in a space that’s not big enough.” When asked about possible plans for retrofitting the building up to earthquake-ready standards, Siel said that while retrofitting is less expensive, it takes up space that is already at a premium. “Retrofitting wouldn’t answer the space issue, it would only make it worse,” he said. The downtown fire station suf fers from similar space problems. When it was built in 1964, the station was not equipped to han dle both sexes of firefighters. Glen Potter, communications director for the Eugene fire de partment, said that while that problem has been corrected, fix ing it has taken up valuable space. “There are also problems mov ing important equipment in and out of the equipment bay,” he said. “There’s just not enough room.” Phil Weiler, Eugene communi cations director, said that the city government will have a chal lenge in balancing the need for new structures while presenting the funding measure in a way that will be palatable to voters. “We need to find something that meets the needs of voters, and this measure contained lots of lit tle pieces that we may need to re arrange or move,” Weiler said. He stressed the need for new buildings for what he called “es sential services” like police and fire units, and said that City Hall would crumble in a major earth quake. Weiler compared the City Hall building, which is built over a parking garage and supported by concrete pillars, to a pizza box suspended by columns of pen nies. “The pennies hold up the piz za box fine, but if you start to wiggle the box, the pennies col lapse,” Weiler said. The same thing would happen to City Hall in a major earthquake, he said, and it would fall directly on the police and fire stations. “The structure would likely suffer complete failure,” he said. “We need to build structures that would last the next 20 years.” P.O. Box 3159. Eugene OR 97403 The Oregon Daily Emerald is published daily Mon day through Friday during the school year and Tuesday and Thursday during the summer by the Oregon Daily Emerald PublishingCo. Inc., at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. A member of the Associated Press, the Emerald operates inde pendently of the University with offices in Suite 300 of the Erb Memorial Union. The Emerald is private property. 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