Pulaski County’s maintenance supervisor is renewing his call for a new fire alarm system for the Justice Center. Jeff Johnston discussed the issue with the county commissioners last week, almost a year after he first brought it up.
“The thing is 20 years old,” he explained. “A lot of the detectors and sensors in the ceiling that detect smoke and heat are radioactive in nature, the way they work, and because of that, they have a half-life. Well, we’ve passed that, so these things are going to start failing. We’ve already seen it happen a couple times. They fail. The fire alarms all go off. The fire department shows up. There’s no fire. There’s no smoke. It’s a sensor that’s bad.”
Making matters worse, according to Johnston, is the fact that the control panel is obsolete. “It still has a floppy disk inside of it,” he told the commissioners. “You can’t get replacement parts for it. So this is something that I think we’re going to have to do. It’s just a matter of figuring out how we’re going to go about doing it.”
He said the cost of replacing the entire system is nearly $41,000. “So, the way to look at this is we spend the $40,000 to replace the whole system, or we just replace each individual one as they go out,” Johnston said. “There’s like 130 of these sensors in that building, and it costs us $700 to $800 apiece to have them come down here and replace them out. The panel is a little bit more expensive.”
Meanwhile, Johnston also said he’s decided to hold off on his plans to replace all the locks at the county’s government buildings, due to possible renovation projects. He added that at this point, the money could be better used in other places.
