OIL SPILL - General Safety Alarm INHIBITED!??

"Oil Rig’s Siren Was Kept Silent, Technician Says" by ROBBIE BROWN, New York Times, 7/23/2010

Excerpt

The emergency alarm on the Deepwater Horizon was not fully activated the day the oil rig caught fire and exploded, killing 11 people and setting off the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a rig worker on Friday told a government panel investigating the accident.

The worker, Mike Williams, the rig’s chief electronics technician, said the general safety alarm was habitually set to “inhibited” to avoid waking up the crew with late-night sirens and emergency lights.

“They did not want people woke up at 3 a.m. from false alarms,” Mr. Williams told the federal panel of investigators. Consequently, the alarm did not sound during the emergency, leaving workers to relay information through the loudspeaker system.

While it is not known whether it would have saved the workers who died in the April 20 disaster, the lack of a fully functioning alarm hampered the effort to safely evacuate the rig, Mr. Williams said.

In a statement, Transocean, which leased the rig to BP, said workers were allowed to set the alarm to prevent it “from sounding unnecessarily when one of the hundreds of local alarms activates for what could be a minor issue or a non-emergency.”

“It was not a safety oversight or done as a matter of convenience,” the company said. Transocean also pointed to a separate audit of the rig in early April, in which inspectors testing the fire detection system found no detectors inhibited.

The last paragraph above, the question NOT answered, is the "fire detection system" alarm separate from the "general safety alarm" system. IF the "general safety alarm" was inhibited would the "fire detection system" alarm still sound?

Then, IF the statement "leaving workers to relay information through the loudspeaker system" is correct, was there a way (and I suspect there is) to manually sound the general alarm? What is the policy for manually setting off the general alarm?

From my 22yrs in the Navy, there is no way that a "general safety alarm" would be allowed to be inhibited in any situation that could effect the safety of the crew, ship, or aircraft. The procedure would be to let the alarm sound THEN manually turn it off AFTER determining that it was a "minor" problem.