Officials criticize student apathy to fire alarm

Many students did not evacuate when an alarm went off in Hamilton House Saturday, jeopardizing safety. Though the fire that gutted a bedroom on the 11th floor of Hamilton College House on Saturday did not result in any injuries, University officials said students' slow evacuation of the building posed a significant safety hazard. A computer monitor overheated in the bedroom at about 11 p.m., getting so hot that it burst into flames and left the former occupant of the room with nothing but the charred remains of possessions. No one was in the apartment at the time of the fire and the rest of the apartment, aside from some water damage and soot, was relatively untouched. The fire occurred during Saturday night's Spring Fling festivities, forcing a carnival in Superblock to be shut down. Officials said because the window in the room was shut, the fire did not have as much of a chance to spread to the surrounding floors. University Police Chief Maureen Rush said that even though many students on the lower floors evacuated the building promptly, some students were still exiting the building as firefighters were packing up their equipment more than half an hour after the alarm first went off. "We found people in the floors above [the fire] combing their hair -- all hearing the alarms, but not leaving," Penn Director of Fire and Occupational Safety Harry Cusick said. During normal high-rise fire drills, officials ask students to walk to the stairwell and go down two flights, which usually takes four to five minutes, Cusick said. Firefighters and police officers knocked at least twice on every door from the floor below the fire to the top of the building to make sure that all students had left the building. Although it is normal Philadelphia firefighting procedure to knock on all doors, Cusick said that looking for students and redirecting them to clear stairways could have taken away attention that might have been needed to rescue trapped or injured students in immediate danger. Rush said there is no official fine for students who choose not to leave their rooms when the alarm rings. During the fire, heavy smoke conditions made it necessary for firefighters to escort students who were late to evacuate the building. "It doesn't take much [smoke] for you to become disoriented," Cusick said. Firefighters need to carry 100 pounds of equipment up to the fire on the same stairs that students use to evacuate, so students who leisurely exit the building could slow down the actual firefighting process, according to Cusick. "If our students aren't leaving in a timely fashion, that starts to affect the capability to put the fire out and do a search and rescue," Cusick said. He said that because students hear the fire alarms often -- due to cooking mishaps and wiring problems -- they might just assume it is false or minor when it sounds. Hamilton House Dean Roberta Stack agreed with Cusick, explaining that last semester there were many false alarms because of faults in the system over a period of a week or so that resulted in "quite a bit of apathy" on the part of the students. Stack and Hamilton Faculty Master Neil Shubin sent messages to students to reinforce to residents the seriousness of fire alarms shortly after the multiple false alarms. "We're very glad that no one was home and that no one was hurt," Stack said. "Things can be replaced."