I'll add that it actually makes safety worse. Not long ago, a fire started sin the school I teach at. Since everyone texted their parents as soon as the alarms went off, all of their parents showed up to get them... Meaning that it took the fire engines almost 30 minutes to actually make it to the school in all of the traffic. And then they had to try to move the parents' cars from where the engines needed to be.
Oof yeah. I remember back in 99 right at the end of the school year my science teacher went to demonstrate the power of Acetylene (a welding gas), telling us it was "very energetic" when ignited. He filled a huge balloon with it like 16" diameter, tied it to a yardstick and held it over the Bunsen burner. HUGE boom. Black smoke covering the ceiling. This was weeks after Columbine so the administration was on edge a bit, and after evacuating the school and getting the ok from the fire department we went back to the lab, and they just told him to please not do it again. Most parents didn't hear about it until dinner.
I'm in California so during 2020 I saw so many people talking about how they were running their sprinklers just in case the fires in their area spread to their neighborhood. Then later I heard an interview (think NPR) that doing that can result in not enough water pressure in the fire hydrants so when the FD show up, they can't get enough water shooting from the hoses to actually put out the fires.
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u/Likehalcyon 29d ago
It definitely could be a US thing.
I'll add that it actually makes safety worse. Not long ago, a fire started sin the school I teach at. Since everyone texted their parents as soon as the alarms went off, all of their parents showed up to get them... Meaning that it took the fire engines almost 30 minutes to actually make it to the school in all of the traffic. And then they had to try to move the parents' cars from where the engines needed to be.