Building 76 will undergo a state mandated Smoke Control and Fire Protection Testing on Tuesday 9/8 and Wednesday 9/9. Please review the below to be aware of the ways in which this testing will or could affect your work with animals, and the steps that DCM is asking you to take to minimize the testing’s potential effect on your research and on animal health and welfare:
On Tuesday 9/8, you may wish to avoid research activities for which noise may be a confounding factor or could cause your animals distress (ie. behavior recordings and behavior tests).
Rationale: Testing of audible alarms and strobes are expected to occur on Tuesday morning only (7:30 – 8:30 AM). The audible alarms should be bypassed shortly after they start, but strobes may not be bypassed. Other tests may cause loud facility pressurization noise (essentially wind noises). Even if you are unable to hear them in your lab, it is highly likely that your animals will be able to. If you typically use a stairwell for access, you may notice increased temperature and/or humidity within the space as well as difficulty opening and closing doors. Use of the stairwells during this testing period has been permitted by the group conducting the tests.
On Wednesday 9/9, the testing process is anticipated to send and hold all lab-side elevators to the ground floor at 9:30am. One elevator is meant to be offline from 9:30am to noon, but they plan to override the second, so it will continue to operate through the testing period. There should not be an impact on animal facility elevators.
In advance of Wednesday 9/9, consider moving any equipment in DCM facilities that you currently have connected to emergency power (red power outlets) to standard power (gray or white outlets), or turning off and unplugging sensitive equipment if it is currently connected to emergency power. If you are unsure of how to proceed with a specific piece of equipment, please email dcm-info@mit.edu with specifics regarding the equipment and its location so that we can advise.
Rationale: Testing of emergency power systems is expected to result in two instances of the emergency power source switching off and immediately turning back off again. The first will occur around 9:30 AM, and the second at a TBD time in the afternoon. Normal (non-emergency) power is not part of this test and is expected to remain on throughout.
What DCM will do: DCM will send a “check your equipment” email out to this list once each switch over has occurred. At that time, you may wish to check any sensitive equipment to confirm that there have not been any adverse effects.
With your cooperation and the precautionary measures outlined above, we are hopeful that we will be able to minimize the impact of this testing on your animal research. However, we cannot always anticipate everything, so if at any point you encounter something unexpected that may be related to this testing that is affecting your work with your animals, please call DCM’s facilities on call person 617-290-0597 (if time sensitive) or emailing dcm-info@mit.edu (only if not time sensitive).