Ring the alarm! I’ve been through this too long!

Has this ever happened to you? You’re minding your own business at 10:00am on a Friday or 2:30am on a Sunday, when all of a sudden your peace is rudely interrupted by that most jarring of sonic warning systems—the humble fire alarm. How many times have you been roused in the middle of the night by an earsplitting screech emanating from the devilish but lifesaving magic boxes affixed throughout the buildings we all call home? Or maybe, while minding your aforementioned business, you heard a distant, faint, muffled noise from the hallway, sounding somewhere between a cat meowing and a leaf settling on pavement, and wondered to yourself, “Is that supposed to be a fire alarm? Am I supposed to leave?”

Well, you’re not alone! Buildings on Columbia’s and Barnard’s campuses, particularly dorms, are very diverse in the character and magnitude of their fire alarm sounds. As a general resource, we’ve asked Bwog’s writing staff to characterize their experiences with the fire alarms in every building in which we’ve experienced them! The fire alarm noises are ranked on a scale of one to 10, one being meek and unintimidating and 10 being deafening and terrifying. Included are testimonies that Bwoggers submitted about each fire alarm. I’ve averaged the scores for each building.

Wien: -2/10. “I thought it was a car alarm on the street for the whole first test and stayed in bed.” “Couldn’t hear it in the shower.”

John Jay: 0/10. “I’ve heard in some rooms you can’t even hear the alarm, so like… 0/10 if you’re in the rooms at the end of the floor.”

Watt hallways: 0/10: “Literally inaudible from my bedroom. Have slept through it and I am one of the lightest sleepers on earth. If there was a fire in this building I would literally just die.”

Harmony: 1/10. “My boyfriend and I both slept through this alarm, meaning it can’t wake up deep OR light sleepers. What a joke!!! The one point comes from the fact that it did indeed wake me up at least once.”

Carlton: 2/10. “Totally sleep-throughable. There were intermittent noises every ten seconds.” “Inconsistent as hell, and there are so many false alarms in the building that it’s hard to tell when it’s real, shit is so not up to code.”

Hartley: 3/10. “Sounds like a nice little bell, it’s constant but not too loud. It still gets your attention though.”

Wallach: 6.5/10. “A bell, like something from an early twentieth century schoolhouse.” “Somewhat quiet, I thought it might just be a loud phone or clock alarm. I only started moving because I heard people opening and closing doors a lot in the hallway.”

616: 6.16/10. “Pretty awful but definitely something you can power through (assuming it’s a drill!)”

Barnard quad: 6.5/10. “Pretty bad, as I recall, but my first-year roommate slept through one so…”

Sulz: 6.5/10. “I showered through a fire alarm in Sulz last year, and only noticed the alarm when I turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. From the bathroom, it just sounded like general hubbub. But got BAD in the hallways.” “9/10— Awful, earsplitting, would wake me up better than my alarms. However, when we had an actual fire freshman year, I don’t think it worked. 1/10 efficacy?”

Furnald: 8/10. “An excruciating ‘beep beep’ fire alarm reminiscent of my elementary school experience. Too loud and went off for weeks randomly after the first alarm”. “A loud siren. But on top of it being a siren, the doubles had a visual fire alarm as well. So when the alarm went off during the witching hours of the night, my room would flash from the oscillation circuit.”

JTS residence hall: 9/10. “Goes off any time the basement gets too hot, a student cooks anything one minute over, and whenever it damn well pleases. It’s loud and has accompanying loudspeaker and strobe lights in every room. Once, it went off for genuinely no reason 4 times over 24 hours, three of those times between the hours of 12am-6am. Since the res hall and the academic buildings are connected, if it happens during the school day, then some of the rabbinical students have the duty to save the Torah scrolls from impending doom, every single time, even though it’s never a fire. The only thing louder than the JTS fire alarm is JTS students complaining about said fire alarm.”

Plimpton: 9/10. “It’s a very scary sound. There’s the regular blaring fire alarm aspect but then interspersed is a weird church bell noise? It’s apocalyptic and haunting and I hate it.” “It’s so haunting for no reason. The first time I heard it was sleeping and thought I was having a nightmare. The fire alarms inside the suites are also so sensitive that after being traumatized two times in a row we deactivated them. So if there’s a real fire in my kitchen and the suite burns down, it’s on the Plimpton fire alarm and its horrific sound.”

Broadway: 9/10. “9.5/10 in the hallways— I was down in the laundry room during one fire alarm and in the hallway during the recent bell test, and it was absolutely cacophonic, feels like its echoing— but 4/10 in the rooms, you can maybe ignore it with a good set of headphones”

Watt rooms: 9.5/10. “Yes, my roommate set off the fire alarm in our room. It was so ear-splittingly loud that I had to go full baby mode and plug my ears, LIKE A NERD. It was humiliating but I am glad I did because otherwise I doubt I would’ve retained my ability to hear.”

Bonus, from a Bwogger studying abroad!

Clare College, Cambridge: 9.5/10. “The most horrifying fire alarm sound I’ve ever heard. Very loud, and instead of the McBain fire alarm, which was just annoying loud beeping, the Cambridge one has this weird siren-like swooping sound (I don’t even know how to describe it; it’s almost like someone dying in a horrible way and screaming but then the scream gets quieter and quieter…) Other than that, my dorm is lovely!”

Let us know in the comments if you agree with our rankings! If your dorm was not mentioned, go trigger your fire alarm so that everybody can hear it!****

**** This is a joke. Do not do this. Bwog is not liable for the actions of any fool that follows this sarcastic advice.

Additionally, Bwog has taken the liberty of brainstorming sounds that Housing could replace the varying fire alarm sounds with. Maybe these would be an improvement over some of the weaker alarms; maybe they’d simply add some spice to our brushes with fire and brimstone!

• The addition of a vine boom
• The coughing sound of @epicgamergrandma4 on TikTok
• The TikTok audio that goes “Taylor Swift. Fearless! Speak No-ow! Re-e-e-ed. 1989. Reputaatioon. Looveeeeeer. Foolkloooore. Evermoooore. Midnights~”
• *single g note on piano*
  • Yeah guys this was a “Welcome to the Black Parade” reference in 2023, you’re welcome!!
• “The A Team” by Ed Sheeran (because this is always the first song to play when my phone connects to my car’s Bluetooth and it always is super loud and scares me really bad and would certainly instantly wake me up in case of a fire)
• The Harry Potter Puppet Pals song
• Someone clearing their throat
• Annoying Orange
• The Star Wars “Imperial March”
• “What Does The Fox Say?”
• Sounds of a building crumbling/earthquake sounds
• Joe Biden saying “Presidential Alert: Obama!”
  • Editor’s note: to the cadence of the “security alert” voice recording in middle school fire drills
• Fairy dust sound (so I can feel like I’m in a dream)
• “Linger” by the Cranberries (but only the yelling part)
• A military trumpet
• Olivia Rodrigo’s screaming part in “All American Bitch”. And when it’s safe to go inside, they should play the outro.
• Why can’t we just have fun music played over loudspeakers? Wouldn’t that be a nicer way to wake up in the middle of the night when someone sets the kitchen on fire than loud beeping? The song could even be “Roar, Lions, Roar” if we want to keep it Columbia-branded…”

Image via Wikimedia Commons