So about 45 minutes after I made my last post, I decided to call the non-emergency police line. I was getting tired and I knew that if the alarm was still going off when I actually wanted to sleep, I would have trouble falling asleep.
I have heard that people can be on hold for hours on the non-emergency line but it only took a minute to get through. I told the call taker exactly what I wrote in my last post: an alarm across the street was going off for nearly an hour and a half, I thought I heard the fire trucks attending earlier but nothing changed, and the alarm was loud enough to bother the whole block. I also told the call taker that I might break into the building soon to turn it off myself if nothing changed.
They knew I wasn’t lying about the alarm because they said they could hear it through the phone. Interestingly, they also said they hadn’t had any reports about this alarm all night. Was I really the first person to call this in after nearly two hours?
Now of course, as it always happens, as I was on the phone, the alarm went off. I told them immediately and remarked that this was just my luck. I went outside onto my balcony and told the dispatcher that I could see fire trucks down the block, in front of the building with the alarm. I guess they finally turned up? Who called them?
The dispatcher said that if the alarm went off again, I should call this number again and to not break into the building to turn off the alarm myself.
The alarm stayed off all night.