Museum Upgrades Vintage Fire System

Jul 1, 2005 12:00 PM

The headquarters of the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland's oldest existing cultural institution, consists of the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum, History Museum and a library/archives. Home to nearly 200 antique, vintage and classic cars and aircraft, the Crawford collection is one of the top 10 in the nation according to Car Collector magazine.

The neighboring Bingham-Hanna house and Hay-McKinney house are meticulously preserved memorials to a simpler time, exhibiting an array of antique furniture, decorative and fine arts, and domestic artifacts.

Until recently, the Society's two museums and administrative offices shared a 40-year-old fire safety system that treated the different buildings of the facility as separate entities.

Mark Corcoran, chief of protection services, eventually chose a new fire safety system from Fire-Lita Alarms, Northford, Conn., a unit of Honeywell.

The system features the MS-9600 panel, which enables remote monitoring capabilities. All alarms for each building are now linked together.

“We haven't had any false alarms, and when the fire department came to do the final system check, it worked flawlessly,” Corcoran says.

Recently the system was called into action when a transformer in the museum's library overheated and started smoking. The smoke triggered an alarm in the library basement and the museum was evacuated until the problem was pinpointed and corrected.

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