During first period on Aug. 21, fire alarms rang out for the first time this school year at Carmel, the result of a duct detector going off. For teachers, it was a test to see whether they could find their curb number, a part of Carmel High School’s new evacuation plan according to assistant principal Amy Skeens-Benton.

“Some of them did not report to the number they were assigned for that period,” she said. “They need to do that but there were only a few and we straightened that out.”

According to Skeens-Benton, all classrooms are assigned a location outside the school’s exits.

“That’s where they go for attendance and that way we can quickly assess who’s out of the building,” she said.

Inside the school, not everything went according to plan. According to Bonnie Grimble, department chair of media and communications, there was a problem with the alarm.

“To my knowledge no one in the communications department heard it,” she said.

Assistant principal Doug Bird confirmed that this was true.

“I received a report that one or a couple of (the alarms) here in the main office area didn’t function as intended so I wanted to determine if there were other areas in the building that were having difficulty too,” he said. It just so happens that in the communications area, I guess those didn’t sound and I haven’t seen any other emails from department chairs yet.

“Obviously they all need to be sounding. That’s why Mr. Williams got on the PA to get everybody out of there because we weren’t sure what areas might be malfunctioning or not,” Bird said.

As for the alarm, maintenance foreman Mike Wyatt said that he still doesn’t know what caused the smoke detector to go off.

“We replaced it to begin with just in case it was faulty but we didn’t see any smoke and the fire department didn’t find any smoke or anything,” he said.