Since the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year, at Enloe High School, student vaping has triggered the fire alarm seven times.
With a total of 11 fire alarms activated, Enloe has had only one scheduled fire drill, the others were because of two causes: work completed by the City of Raleigh that affected our sprinkler system and students vaping.
“The research and the science shows that the long term health implications of vaping are really severe…what vaping does to the lungs is permanent irreversible damage,” said Dr. Jordan, Enloe’s Principal.
In addition to its health consequences, vaping causes excessive fire alarms, which will lead to complacency in students as they begin to disregard alarms, continued Dr. Jordan.
“Across our school system, there have been more fire alarms in the school systems and a number of our fire alarms have been due to vaping in bathrooms,” says Braxton Tanner, the Wake County Fire Marshall responsible for all fire code enforcements across Wake County Public Schools.
Although the particles in vaping aerosol are generally smaller and less dense than those in smoke, the sensors located in Enloe restrooms are easy to trigger and cannot distinguish the difference. This causes many students to believe that vapes won’t trigger the smoke detectors, but they do.
“Anytime these smoke detectors are having to operate the smoke sensors, there is some degradation of that detector,” says Tanner. In addition to making the safety mechanisms less reliable, false alarms due to vaping further strain the already scarce local emergency response resources. Before students can reenter the facility, the Fire Department must respond and verify there is no fire. This means that these fire alarms last significantly longer than any drill or alarms due to City of Raleigh maintenance.
On Wake County Public School property, students shall not possess, display, or use any tobacco products. Setting off a smoke detector, whether intentionally or inadvertently, carries far more severe punishments than a school suspension. Furthermore, each instance is reported to local law enforcement and in certain cases, if emergency response services were dispatched as the result of a fire alarm triggering from student vaping, the student can face criminal charges resulting in penalties and fines that permanently show on your record.
“Young people think they live forever, and they don’t. What you do in your youth affects you when you get old like me, in ways that you cannot comprehend,” says Ms. Covington, an English teacher who has taught at Enloe for 21 years, “vaping is something that you will fight for the rest of your lives, it’s an addiction.”
