The city of Vancouver and its surrounding areas were subjected to a fierce windstorm last night. Before going to bed, I thought the high winds wouldn’t have any effect on my night. It wouldn’t be until the wee hours of the morning that I would be proven wrong.
Sometime around 6:45am, the fire alarm in my building went off. We had a false alarm recently, so like that time, I just laid in bed, ignoring it. Now for some people, a 6:45am wake up call isn’t that bad since that’s close to their normal wake up time anyways. Not so for me as I’m probably in my deepest REM sleep at that point.
Now awake in my bed, I listened to the alarm chime and then waited for the inevitable sound of sirens as the fire trucks raced towards my building. Sure enough the sirens came and I then could hear the trucks roar down my street. Then as I expected, the sirens stopped, a few minutes passed, the alarm stopped, and then I heard the trucks leave. It was well after 7am at this point, so I just tried to fall back asleep. Just as I was getting drowsy enough to be unconscious, the alarm went off again! For sure, this had to be another false alarm. The alarm went off for less than three minutes before it was turned off again. This time, no fire trucks came.
Though short as the second alarm was, I was now awake again. By the time my own alarm clock went off, I was extremely groggy. It’s never a good sign when you get out of bed and the first feeling you have is overwhelming exhaustion.
I later e-mailed the building manager to find out the cause of the false alarms. It turns out the high winds had damaged a pipe somewhere and that triggered the alarms. He didn’t give me any more info than that.