Residents of Dorchester House apartment building on 16th Street in Adams Morgan are upset after a fire last Wednesday. Nobody was seriously hurt and the D.C. Fire Department responded quickly and extinguished the blaze, but the building’s alarm apparently never went off. In a message posted to the neighborhood listserv, a resident reports

A friend pulled the fire alarm in my hallway, but NO SOUND CAME OUT WHATSOEVER. In response to this shocking development, we ran through the hall pounding on apartment doors, telling people to evacuate. … Last night’s experience was terrifying and was clearly an EGREGIOUS violation of fire code regulations. My building has hundreds of apartments, and is in the process of embarking on an ambitious expansion project. BEFORE THESE PLANS GO FORWARD, WE MUST DEMAND that Dorchester do an intensive investigation of the fire code violations that led to yesterday’s safety crisis. I mean, a building of likely THOUSANDS of residents with NO central alert system?

Another poster from the 5th floor of the building also says she didn’t hear the alarm, but “The building managers were testing the alarm this morning and it worked fine.” A DCist who was in the neighborhood at the time reports he saw “no alarms going off, just a bunch of panicked people and their pets fleeing the building … Any sort of smoke detector or heat detector should have noticed the fire. There were huge flames and tons of smoke.” We hope the building management resolves the problem promptly.

The photo is from this D.C. Fire Department page.