How do security guards handle fire alarms?

The sequence, written into the post orders

Every Price Protection post in a building with a fire alarm has an alarm section in its post orders, written from the building’s own fire plan. It names the panel location, the monitoring company, the fire department’s expectations, the assembly points, the occupants who need help to evacuate and the person at the property to call. The officer’s response follows it in order: panel, zone, call, evacuate, check, meet, log. The officer never assumes a false alarm, because the cost of being wrong once outweighs every nuisance alarm before it.

What the officer does not do

Fight a fire that is more than a wastebasket. Enter a zone that is showing smoke. Reset or silence the panel before the fire department clears it, however loud it is and however many residents ask. Delay the call to see whether it is real. Those are the mistakes that turn alarms into losses, and the training and the post orders are built to prevent them.

After the alarm

The officer records the time of the alarm, the zone, the calls made, the evacuation, the fire department’s arrival and clearance, and the cause if it was found, in the daily report and, where anything happened, in an incident report the same day. Repeated nuisance alarms from one zone are a maintenance finding for the property, and the report says so.

When the alarm itself is down

If the panel fails or the monitoring line drops, the building has an impairment, and the fire marshal may require a fire watch until it is restored. The officer on post reports the failure to the manager and the impairment coordinator immediately, and the fire alarm outage page explains what follows. The fire alarms article covers the response in more detail.