Sound the Alarm, Genesis is on Fire!

After a long time coming, our building now sports a brand new, state of the art, fire alarm system.

Over the past few years, Genesis has been taking an especially sober look at what’s holding up and what’s wearing out in our aging building.

At our next Tri-Board meeting in June, we expect our congregations to formally approve the Reserve Investment Plan we’ve developed and to finalize its level and mechanism of funding. But before the RIP plan is sealed and delivered, a couple of failing systems—from elevators to RTUs—have already forced the issue.

The fire alarm system is probably the most critical among them.

the old fire alarm box

The system remained in generally functional order through 2023 . But “functional” is a low bar for a critical safety system. For some time at each service call, technicians expressed growing doubt that they could continue to maintain it even at that level. Parts were no longer manufactured. There was a mounting sense that if a critical component failed, we might not be able to bring it back up, at least not quickly. In April 2024, the board tasked Facilities Attendant Steven Kurz with exploring our options.

The system in use at the time was not born out of whole wires. It was never so much designed as perpetually extended. The earliest version was a small panel in the furnace room, back when the Social Hall was still our sanctuary. When the classroom wing was added, alarms were tied into that. In 1994, when the current sanctuary was built, a new panel went into the mechanical room by the elevator—a black panel with rows of red LEDs. Later, when sprinklers were added to the lower level classrooms, those were folded in too. At some point after that, a second “red box” was added next to the main panel to handle the growing number of devices it needed to monitor. What we ended up with was a system that reflected the building’s history—layered, expanded, and increasingly hard to support.

Our first instinct was to keep patching it, as we had been doing, as we always try to do when it can save our congregations money. We made a real attempt to repair the existing panel, including tracking down a re-certified main board for a system that had long since been discontinued. That repair would have cost just $3,000—a fraction of a full replacement. But even as we explored that option, it became increasingly clear that we were running short on fuse. By early 2025, the question had shifted from how long we could keep the old system going to how to replace it.

The formal proposals made crystal clear what a modern code-compliant system would actually require. What we had been thinking of in terms of direct replacement of old components was no longer even an option. Current Michigan Building Code for “assembly occupancy” buildings like Genesis requires a system that can communicate instructions throughout the building, not just sound an alarm.

Of the bids we solicited, only the one from National Time & Signal explicitly included such a voice evacuation system. NTS quoted around $136,000 for the work. The other bid came in significantly lower at $100,000, but lacked that required functionality. The board approved the NTS proposal in March 2025.

The board soon realized that this requirement overlapped with the FEMA-funded security work already underway. The 2023 FEMA grant, whose term ends this summer, includes adding a building-wide public address system for emergency communication. We are exploring whether any of the nearly $30,000 allocated for this purpose in that grant might be used to defray some of the costs of the fire alarm system which now provides that capability.

NTS’ work on the system commenced nearly a year ago, in May 2025. NTS installed pull stations at exits, detectors in classrooms and hallways, and speaker-strobes on walls and ceilings. Wiring had to be run through a mix of accessible ceilings and finished spaces. Meanwhile the old system needed to stay active while the new one was being installed. Fire alarm systems should never have a moment of downtime.

By late 2025, the system looked finished, but it hadn’t yet been approved. Final inspections uncovered a number of additional issues, including a need to interface with Guardian Alarm’s monitoring system, that each had to be corrected before the city would sign off. Each round of fixes led to another inspection requiring coordination between our staff, the installer, the city inspector, and the fire department. It kept being close, then not quite, then close again.

During that same stretch, an annual sprinkler inspection turned up some problems: a missing sprinkler head in a lower-level closet and a leaking pipe in the boiler room. Those were scoped and approved separately. These are the last bits of the fire protection work still pending.

By mid-March, the system passed a final round of inspections and finally went fully online.

One system down. So many of the biggest and most critical improvements to our building happen behind the walls (or over the roof).

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The board thanked Steven and the staff at its March meeting for all the work they have put into seeing this installation to fruition.