Being thrown to the wolves on a fire alarm renovation. Should I find a new job?

Im a Canadian green journeyman on my first construction project. Its a renovation of a multi story pre-existing building where theyre adding a daycare to the second floor. My company hired me because I worked as a fire alarm inspector for a year so they figured I was a good choice to do fire alarm.

Basically the job im on started 3 months before they had a permit or any finalized IFC prints. They also changed the HVAC plan half way through the job and literally have us all redoing tons of work to accommodate HVAC. They also revised the prints about 4 times. There's plenty of other stuff thats gone wrong but the main one im getting anxiety about is that their fire alarm prints had no instructions other than "interlock to pre-existing system" their prints didnt show anything other than a few pull stations and smoke detectors and hornstrobes in the rooms. We're a few weeks from the end of the job now and the engineers just now informed us that the system needs an additional 7 duct smokes added that wasnt accounted for at all in our original lay out. We have absolutely no instructions on how to monitor the fire smoke dampers or whether the duct smokes require LED notification panels for ceiling mounts. Theyre literally just asking me (a green journeyman with a bit of fire alarm experience) what material and devices i need to make their fire alarm renovation work. Any time ive messaged the engineers an RFI they message me back vague 1 sentence long replies (liability shielding?) and generally take forever to reply. My project managers even tell me that they just call the engineers to ask questions cause they dont want to email them. So their isnt a paper trail for some of their "approvals".

Recently my foreman has started his new job and theyve put me in charge of this project. At first I was down with it for the experience but this fire alarm work makes the hair stand up on my neck. It would be one thing if it was a brand new build but they seem to think its fine to just have me renovate an existing system with no info, a bit of experience, and engineers who dont want to participate.

Everyone at my company has been nice which is why Ive stuck around but I cant help but worry that im sort of becoming a defacto designer for their fire system. I really dont know what liability this opens me to.

Thoughts? Im down to finish this job if I can but I really do not trust this company running this job anymore.

Posted Jan 8, 2026, 11:54 PM UTC

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