A fire alarm about 7 a.m. Friday at the Des Moines Area Community College Perry VanKirk Career Academy brought the Perry Volunteer Fire Department to the scene, where they found a faulty air compressor in the welding shop caused the alarm.
“There was an electronic valve on an air compressor that was allowing air to escape,” said Assistant Fire Chief Kevin McLaughlin, “which then made the compressor continually run and run and run. Finally, the heat from the motor running got the room hot enough that it tripped the heat detector in the room.”
Once the cause of the heat was determined, the firefighters “just turned off the air compressor and put a fan up there to cool the room down,” McLaughlin said. “The fire alarm went back to normal, and they called their maintenance people to come and fix it.”
McLaughlin noted “the exact same thing happened there a year or so ago,” when a malfunction in the air compressor system caused a heat buildup, as reported in ThePerryNews.com Sept. 18, 2016. “The air compressor was doing what it was supposed to do, but that valve must have failed and allowed the air to escape.”
There were no injuries in the morning incident.