I'm not saying it happens all the time, but it could happen, especially in a packed room, such as a theater. If death results from an intentional false alarm, I believe the culprit should be punished, and we should discourage such behavior.
Of course, we shouldn't punish people who genuinely thought there was a fire. We definitely should encourage people to give the alarm when needed.
"Intentional false alarms of any kind, especially through emergency notification systems, are very serious criminal offenses, and can result in very severe legal punishments."
>>>> Even if they're only relaying the news without checking.
Dunno if you recognize that, but it's my premise from earlier. In it I was talking about a scenario like the one in Mexico is thought to be - a re-tweeter, not a rumor creator.
I think we are actually in agreement on this. It's wrong to punish people who genuinely thought there was a fire, or who relayed a reasonably plausible alarm without checking.
My initial comment wasn't an attempt to totally rebute yours, and I should have made that clear. I was focusing on:
>>>The downside? One unnecessary evacuation that probably needed practice anyways.
You seemed to consider the unnecessary evacuation as a minor perturbation. I pointed out that such an evacuation is not 100% risk-free.
Of course, nothing is 100% risk-free, and we need to take this into account when doing risk analysis. After our discussion, I guess the risk of accidents during an unnecessary evacuation might actually be lower than the risk of having people not raising the alarm when needed (due to a fear of being punished if it turns out they were wrong). But this risk still needs to be weighed when considering this problem.
Of course, we shouldn't punish people who genuinely thought there was a fire. We definitely should encourage people to give the alarm when needed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_alarm
"Intentional false alarms of any kind, especially through emergency notification systems, are very serious criminal offenses, and can result in very severe legal punishments."