Blaze guts apartments in Hamilton House

No one was hurt during the fire on the 11th floor. Officials have ruled the blaze accidental. A fire broke out in an 11th floor Hamilton College House apartment Saturday night after a computer monitor overheated and burst into flames at about 11 p.m. There was no one in the apartment at the time and there were no reported injuries. The fire took nearly half an hour to get under control and gutted the room where it started. The fire, which the Philadelphia Fire Marshall declared accidental, did not spread further than the three-bedroom triple it originated in, leaving the rest of the floor and building unscathed. Police believe that after the monitor exploded, nearby items caught on fire and the blaze quickly spread to other parts of the room. The apartment itself, according to one of its former residents, is covered with soot and the bedroom where the fire started is unrecognizable. All three residents have been moved to the Sansom Place facilities -- formerly known as the Graduate Towers -- for the remainder of the semester. "Walking back into that room and seeing the very chair that you sat upon two hours ago, now a piece of wood on the ground, charred and decaying, is surreal," the student said. Two University Police officials first noticed smoke coming out of the building as they were walking on Locust Walk and students at the Spring Fling Carnival in Superblock could see flames coming out of the building. Although the building's fire alarm was set off, many students in the building did not immediately evacuate, University Police Chief Maureen Rush said, requiring police officers and firefighters to knock on doors and make sure that the dorm was vacant. "People didn't take the alarm seriously," Rush said. "There were people still kind of finally coming out of their dorm rooms well into the completion of the firefighters putting out the fire. People who were just not answering doors -- they were the ones that were most at risk had this been a major fire." Police allowed students to return to the building about an hour after the fire was put out. According to the student whose apartment caught on fire, the police officers on the scene provided the most comfort, joking around and helping to put things in perspective. "On the grand scheme of disasters this doesn't rank very high. What it would have been like had someone actually been injured? is actually too painful to imagine," he said. "So I take comfort in the fact the only things physically damaged were material possessions that can be replaced." The fire occurred in the middle of Spring Fling weekend, causing police to shut down the Social Planning and Events Committee-sponsored carnival that was taking place outside of the building. University Police cleared several hundred students attending the carnival from Locust Walk so firefighters could get their equipment to the high rise. University officials will examine the incident to determine ways to have students take fire alarms more seriously, especially those students living in high rises because fires on high floors are more difficult to put out. "When people hear fire alarm bells, [they] should never assume that it's a fire drill," Rush said, adding that students who make that assumption are "endangering themselves and the public safety workers who now have to go floor to floor and individually yank people out of their rooms."