Beth Welch from Honeywell Fire Systems profiles the installation of a detection and alarm system at a large healthcare site in the state of New York.

Life safety is extremely important in hospital environments, due to the large majority of occupants who may not be able to fend for themselves in an evacuation situation. This is especially true of large multiple-building campuses where the lives of hundreds of patients could be in jeopardy if a fire were to go unnoticed for even a small period of time.

St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, New York is one of the area's largest health care providers. The downtown campus is comprised of a six-story facility, connected to eight other structures using either climate-controlled tunnels or overhead enclosed bridges. This 140-year old institution has grown to occupy six city blocks. Other facilities contained within this complex are a four-story office and administration building; a ten-story garage and medical office building; an eight-story college of nursing facility, equipped with a six-story residential block and classrooms; a two-story special services facility; and a ten story medical office centre.

Laid to rest
Fire alarm protection throughout the hospital's many buildings had encompassed an assortment of systems. "Our fire alarm systems were made up of FCI, Mirtone, and Simplex equipment," says Matthew Auwae, St. Joseph's manager of building services. "Each system was of various ages. Some components had become antiquated and no longer available on the market when service or modification was needed."

Considering the whole complex was protected by eight different fire alarm systems, hospital officials were eager to consolidate them using a single integrated fire alarm platform.

"Our company took over the hospital fire alarm systems' maintenance in 1981 and has been the only company since that time to maintain it," says John R. Urciuoli, president and CEO of ST&A  in Syracuse, New York. "The numerous systems made maintenance difficult and costly. To make the systems operate satisfactorily with the facility's growth over the last 20 years has been a real challenge. Each system operated differently."

According to Mr Urciuoli, every time there was an expansion project at the hospital, confusion among the systems grew. The only means of integration required ingenuity and on-the-spot engineering to comply with code requirements. This approach presented more maintenance and operational difficulties and, looking ahead, the hospital was contemplating several more expansion projects.

ST&A, a Gamewell-FCI engineered systems distributor, proposed an integrated fire alarm solution. This was accepted by the hospital management, who hired an independent consultant, Robson Woese, to design a technically advanced, single source integrated system for the complex.

The consultant's main task was to design a horizontal evacuation plan that complies with current NFPA standards. Defining fire zones and smoke and fire barriers was the first step. Next was the development of a voice alarm system that indicates fire ‘zone' origins to all occupants, while providing evacuation instructions to relevant areas. The new design specified Gamewell-FCI's most versatile platform. The 7100 NetSOLO fire alarm control, integrated with the E3 Series voice evacuation system, completed the new network.

"We had two custom cabinets built to house all the ASM-16s (addressable switch modules)," explains Mark Simpson, a vice president at ST&A. "Firefighter phones are installed throughout the complex and ring only to the pertinent command centres. The command centres are configurable to fit 40 of the ASM-16s. These 16-button modules have three coloured LEDs associated with each button to provide feedback on the status of each button."

As one of the addressable modules, the ASM-16 is programmable via software. Each 16-push-button switch can be used for an assortment of functions, including a fire zone speaker circuit switch, firefighter phone switch, auxiliary control switch or any number of applications relating to system functionality, such as device reset.

"With the new system we installed, just the push of a button will take a zone out of operation. This allows hospital management to do whatever they need to with regard to maintenance or testing. No one can believe how easy it is now," says Mr Simpson.

The new system installed by Myriad Construction is made up of 54 nodes on a 100 percent fibre backbone. A great deal of planning was done in relation to conduit routes and firewall patching. The installation used CI (circuit integrity) cable in conduit to provide two-hour fire NAC (notification appliance circuit) survival with one terminal box in each fire zone. All wires are labelled, tagged and archived on CAD (computer-aided drawing) files. The result is an amazingly serviceable and expandable installation.

System delivers control
To effectively control the fire alarm system in a complex the size of St Joseph's, you 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 centre 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 centres in total.

"The system is set up for horizontal evacuation and is programmed using positive non-interfering sequential encoding," explains Mark 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, it is critical that the life safety system directs 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 powerful Boolean logic feature. Dick Aldrich, Gamewell-FCI project engineer and Mike Riggin, ST&A's vice president of service operations worked together, brainstorming code to ensure the system operated properly and all command centres functioned as specified.

Given his knowledge of the facility's day-to-day operations, Mr 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."

The E3 Series' EVAC (emergency voice/alarm communication) capabilities delivered on one of the project's most important specifications: its ability to provide custom announcements on a zone-by-zone, floor-by-floor basis assured hospital personnel of a more organised and safe evacuation during any number of emergency situations.

"We can sync audio messages from multiple sources being outputted by multiple amps, and still maintain sync across the network," says project manager Dick Aldrich. "We have messages stored in nodes near each area they protect so if one or two areas go into alarm, the messages that those occupants hear come from the nearest network node."

Another breakthrough in the design of today's fire alarm systems is survivability. A distributed architecture design allows the E3 Series to continue operating when portions of the network are severed from the head-end during a fire or other incident. "I call this a self-correcting, fault-tolerant system, because if part of the network is severed in one or more places, each fragment will still perform according to information contained in a node within that area," adds Mr Aldrich. "And then, once the problem is corrected and the network restored, the system will synchronise within as little as four seconds."

The use of network technology to transport signals from the fire alarm control centre to each NGA (network graphic annunciator) is another important feature for hospital officials. The NGA offers better command and control due to its user-friendly, intuitive touch screen human interface, which is as easy to use as a common ATM. In instances where the operator may not be familiar with system operation, it provides immediate communications and easy-to-follow instructions through the use of layered menu screens.

High speed, low cost
The E3 Series system features a high-speed data network called ARCnet over which control and sensor data and audio communication travels. With this, each pair of wires can be isolated on a node-to-node basis, facilitating system survivability during catastrophic events.

Behind the St. Joseph's ARCnet data connection are intelligent SLC (signaling line circuit) controller boards, containing a 32-bit ‘reduced instruction set computer' processor. The processors boost overall reliability during day-to-day use. Each intelligent interface board provides two SLCs, each of which has a potential capacity of 159 addressable detectors and 159 addressable modules. In addition, each dual-SLC processor board contains two NACs, a local energy city box output, auxiliary relay functions, and an auxiliary power supply output. To ensure the system continues operating in a code-compliant manner, the same intelligent dual-SLC/NAC processor board offers a number of relay outputs, such as alarm, supervisory and system trouble.

The E3 Series is the first of its kind to offer complete integration using just twisted-pair metallic wires or one dual fibre optic cable. By minimising the number of wires installed, the new system reduced the overall cost of on-site labour. Moreover, the installation's impact on the physical appearance of buildings throughout the complex was minimal.

"There was extensive work involved with the selection of this system," concludes St. Joseph's manager of building services, Matthew Auwae. "And if we had to do it all over again, we'd pick the same company and the same system."

Beth Welch is a manager at Honeywell Fire Systems. beth.welch@honeywell.com.