Firemen Treated to Cake Following False Alarm

Monday afternoon alarmed parents with their children in Reagan Elementary School saw and heard San Angelo Fire Department trucks rushing to their school with lights and sirens blaring.

The school's fire alarm system was activated and kids were in the building. Well, some kids, anyway.

“It was after school, three students were waiting to be picked up,” Karen Clark, Reagan Elementary Principal, explained. “An aide told me ‘If I had never seen it for myself I never would have believed it.'”

Clark explained that a girl’s ponytail hit a fire annunciator and set off the alarm. More, an intermittent, broken sprinkler had a bad sense of timing and gushed at full force just as the little girl’s ponytail swiped the annunciator. But there was never a fire, the principal said.

“Our first call was to the fire department, but they [the aid and staff] weren’t fast enough,” Clark said. “The San Angelo Fire Department got here before we could call them off.”

All of the teachers were in the library for a faculty meeting and monthly birthday celebrations. The Reagan faculty decided that since the firefighters were on the scene anyway, they'd take the cake out to them as a peace offering and apologize for the false alarm.

“All students were already off campus except those three.” said Clark, “We would have evacuated but there were no kids here to evacuate.”

However, Clark does take comfort in knowing that the SAFD’s response time is excellent and will avoid future disasters.

“If anything does happen, we know we’re in good shape,” she said.