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MILWAUKEE - Questions about the fire alarm system at Milwaukee’s City Hall: a fire broke out on the roof Wednesday, but the fire alarms were not sounded right away. Firefighters always say seconds count. So why did it take a few minutes before the alarms in City Hall were sounded Wednesday? Dispatcher: 911 Milwaukee sheriff, what is your emergency?” Caller: “Uh, City Hall, the roof is on fire.” Dispatcher: “The roof is on fire at Milwaukee City Hall?” Caller: “Milwaukee City Hall.” Dispatcher: “I'll notify the Milwaukee Fire Department.” 911 operators were flooded with callers near City Hall who saw flames shooting out of the roof. Caller: “I’m across the street from City Hall and there's like flames on the roof.” So how is it that people outside City Hall knew the building was on fire before anyone inside? Police Sgt. Louis Gonzalez saw the flames from the outside, went in and pulled the alarm. It was silent. “Yes, it was a concern, it really was,” Gonzalez said. Gonzalez ran to alert others in the building to get out. It took a few more minutes before the alarms were finally sounded and strobes activated. That's because the manual fire alarms are controlled by a centralized computer system. The alarms were temporarily silenced to avoid false alarms during construction. “During the course of this restoration project we get visual confirmation there is a fire. At that time that's when we hit audio and visual strobes,” the project manager said. The project manager says as they sounded the alarms, the fire department was already on scene, but he says they will make changes. “As a result of what has occurred, we are going to reprogram the system to have the pull alarm activate the audio immediately,” the project manager said. In the end, there are no injuries and damage is limited to $10,000.