This is not a drill.....

05 November 2007, Monday - What the?!

All of a sudden, at about 3.45pm the siren went off and this came over the PA system. "This is not a drill. Please evacuate the building immediately!"

We were all very bewildered by the announcement and looked to our fire warden, Matt to check if this is part of our practice evacuation. He was as bewildered as us and said that he had not been notified that there's a drill so this must be for real. We were told to grab our bags and head for the stairs.

We were just a teeny bit anxious to our predicament as there was really a fire at the 13th floor a couple of weeks back. Something in the battery room caught fire / short circuited that day. Lori and Stephanie were early birds and were in the office by 5.30am and had to be evacuated when it happened.

After climbing down 12 flights of stairs, we arrived at the lift lobby and exited the building. We saw two fire engines at the foot of the building but no firemen in sight. Could they have gone up the building? As we were walking, we looked up and saw no smoke billowing from any of the windows / floors above.










When we got to our gathering spot at ANZ Square, we did a headcount. Apparently, the alarm had been going on for a while but it was only heard if you were in the lift lobby. Nothing was heard in any of the offices / suites! Luckily somebody was at the lift lobby and enquired about it. Only then did they "release" the alarm and sent it to the offices / suites. Then we also found out that only people from levels 12 and below were evacuated. Nobody from level 14 and above got out of the building. The siren didn't go off for them!














After about 20 minutes, we were allowed back into the office. Fortunately, there were no real fire incidents and nobody was hurt.

We had no answer as to what triggered the alarm or what caused the alarm to fail. But somebody better take a good look at the alarm system before we appear on the front page of AU newspapers....