EE pulled fire alarm falsely

deniseE

An employee falsely activated our fire alarm this morning causing the local fire department to report to our building. In additional a woman was seriously injured in the melee as she attempted to evacuate the building.

Has anyone ever prosecuted an Employee for such activity?

Thanks!!!

SMace

Couple of things come to mind.

1. Sounds like you need to practice your evacuations and maybe have some training on emergency procedures. You described it as a melee and that is not what your looking for in an evacuation plan. I would think it is unusual that someone would be seriously injured evacuating a building.

2. I have never prosecuted anyone for this. I'm assuming you already fired him and now want to do more. I would take that up with the police department. I would say there is probably a law against what he did.

3. One might argue, however, that he did you a favor by pointing out the problems with your evacuation plan. Had a real emergency been happening people may have been killed.

Don D

Employers don't 'prosecute' people. Government officials do. You might want to tell the police you'd like to file charges and see if they consider a law to have been broken. If a law was broken and you file charges and affix your name to the filing, the county district attorney (or similar authority) has the decision to make regarding prosecution.

I agree that this is not a case for progressive discipline and termination is a must.

mrbill

I would like to hear how / why did he 'falsely activate' the system. If there was any element of a valid reason, then you have no case. You may even be able to turn this into a positive event. Evacuation procedures should be held on a regular basis.

marc

I would probably terminate. This is not an area to allow whimsy. Follow Don D's suggestion with the authorities.

That said, you should get the wake-up call about the weaknesses in your evacuation process. Have a couple of sanctioned drills after reviewing the procedures with everyone. Do it every year. I am sure others can tell you how requently they have fire drills and the like. We only have about 45 EEs in our building, plus whatever client load at any one time, and we do fire drills twice a year. Unannounced. We grade our performance and people who ignore the drill are written up.

deniseE

Termination is not even a question! As soon as we figure out who did it (and we will certainly want to know WHY!) termination will begin.

Generally, our evacuations (we practice quarterly) are smooth sailing. In this case, we are theorizing that the woman that was hurt was close to the person pulling the alarm and she was knocked over, but until she is able to tell us what really happened, we're just speculating.

I found several statutes under PA that make a false fire alarm illegal. When I initially asked the question, I wasn't sure if it was a Legal problem or an internal one. Once we have a name, we will gladly hand it over to the police.

Thank you for all your input!!!!