At 6:51 p.m. on February 24, a smoke detector malfunctioned on the third floor of Bodine Residence Hall, setting off the building’s alarm and causing it to be evacuated. At 11 a.m. on February 25, it happened a second time. At 2:38 a.m. on February 26, someone pulled a false alarm on the sixth floor of Bodine, making students leave their rooms and stand out in the cold for the third time in a little over 24 hours. Understandably, students were annoyed. The first two fire alarms were the result of a faulty resister in the base of the third floor north fire alarm. After the first malfunction, Buildings and Grounds staff disconnected the fire alarm that they thought had caused the alarm. They guessed wrong, however, and the malfunction occurred again. After the second occurrence, B& G shut down two more smoke detectors until the contractors that deal with such problems in the fire detection and security systems, Siemens, could come and remedy the problem later that day.
The third alarm was classified as an intentional, malicious pull. When security staff arrived at the sight where the alarm was pulled, they found that there were no indications of fire, and that the glass covering had been removed and the lever pulled. The person or persons responsible have not been caught.
Prior to these three incidences, only one fire alarm was activated in Bodine this semester, which was caused when someone left raw spaghetti, with no pot and no water, on a stove burner that was left on. It is unclear whether this was intentional or accidental, but Residential Director for the building, Isack Wasserman, said, “We’ll just file this one under talented cooks.”
Director of UB Security, April Vournelis, explained that, while malfunctions like those that took place on February 24 and 25 are unavoidable, false alarms are both bothersome and dangerous. When students have to drag themselves out of bed regularly to stand in the cold while security discovers that yet another alarm was a prank pulled by one of the residents, they tend to lose any sense of the danger of a real fire that the alarm might announce. Students tend to ignore the alarms, refusing to evacuate because it’s “just another alarm.”
Vournelis feels that most students don’t realize the danger that they are in if the building they are in does catch fire, saying, “It doesn’t take that long for a building to go up. It’s not the fire that’s going to kill most people, it’s the smoke. The smoke will overtake most before they can get out.”
She went on to detail some of the plans she is trying to establish to enforce evacuation, and cut down on the number of false alarms.
Currently, the penalty for pulling a false alarm in a residence hall is a fifty-dollar fine. Vournelis is currently working to increase this fine.
She is also trying to change the way in which security staff and residential life staff work together to clear the building quickly during an alarm, because the longer they stay in the building, the more danger they could be in if the building is really on fire. Also, with new key-in procedures, security will be better able to get students out of the building who are ignoring the alarm, or who don’t hear it.
Vournelis did mention, however, that overall the students are pretty cooperative. When buildings other than dorms have accidental alarms during the work day, and they have to evacuate, Security often gets more resistance and less compliance from university staff that they do when students must leave a dorm at 3 a.m.
But the overall message that Vournelis wished to stress is to ALWAYS evacuate during a fire alarm, no matter how inconvenient, because the one time that you don’t, it could be for real.