Amazingly, I cannot remember that there was ever any serious fire in the camps here in town, during the 34 years I worked there. Well, there was a bomb that went off in a accomodation block - but that doesn't need much of a fire alarm system, believe me. You're not gonna miss noticing when that happens...
And a few times guys in the workshops smoked a car by welding on it. But thats also pretty obvious and they had extinguishers ready to use quickly enough.
The only time I've seen a house really messed up was a house of a officer's family. They all went on vacation back in England over the christmas break, like 3 or 4 weeks. When they left, they thought it would be a good idea to turn the electricity off at the fuse box, to prevent a fire by malfunctioning electrics.
What they didn't think off was, that this would also turn of the heating system. Over christmas there was a severe cold spell, like -15°C for 2 weeks - and that made all the water pipes in the house burst from freezing. The whole place was totally soaked and frozen up, you could do ice skating in the living room. The family got relocated - after a severe telling off - and it took month to make the house useable again.
But the dodgy fire alarm system in the camp blocks was really annoying. And I bet it had cost a fortune as well. It wasn't just smoke alarms or stuff like that. There was lots of sensors everywhere, connected to a steel cabinet at the entrance of each block, that was full of signal lights and buttons and stuff. And those block alarms were all linked to a central alarm panel in the guard room, so they can see where the fire is, direct the fire brigade and emergency service ect.
But such complex systens can be funny. Another such system was the internal telephone sytem. When the camps were built, which was still before WW2 in the mid 1930s by the Germans, there was probably one phone in each block, and may be a few more in the headquarter block. And after the war, when the Brits moved in, they started adding more and more phones and phone lines, over the period of 60 years. At the end, there was a phone in every room, even in the basements. And in office rooms they had 6 or 8 phones in a room even.
And there was only one guy from the German Telekom who really understood how this all worked. Everybody knew him, because he had been there so often over such a long time. If he wasn't available, they were screwed. At times I saw some young guys from Telekom, desperatly running around measuring lines in switch boxes here and there, unable to figure out how this all works.
I somehow have the suspicion, the real reason behind the withdraw of the British army back to the UK was, that this Telekom guy had retired. :)