F. George McDuffee wrote:

I've serviced fire alarms in big cinemas like that. The protocol is
pretty complex. Once smoke is detected anywhere in the building *all*
of the projectors shut down, the RTU's are shut off, house lights come
on full brightness, emergency exit signs flash, elevators recall & lock
open, and a coded message - "the siren tone" with voice egress
directions are announced on all speakers. We spend a lot of effort to
make all that happen.

I want to know why the fire alarm didn't do that.
snip

Thanks for the input on this!

Another very good and cogent question. Let us hope the
investigators were able to determine this (or bothered to
check) and that the evidence has not been "cleaned up"
and/or the security tapes recycled [erased]. Now where are
the so-called investigative reporters?

As in so many incidents lately, including random mass
shootings, we are left with far more questions than answers
-- far more myths than facts.

The central station will have all those records in chronological order
as each detector was tripped.

If smoke was filled so thick as they say, the FA would have detected it
and acted accordingly. If not, the FA was malfunctioning or there
wasn't as much smoke as we've been told.