By Jenni Beaver—Around nine o’clock on Wednesday, March 25, students and faculty in the Science Center were jarred by an unusual sound, the fire alarms going off.
Claire DeRoin, the building manager for the Science Center, was surprised by the blaring sound. Her first thought was that maintenance had set off the alarms again. That wasn’t an unusual occurrence. However, after realizing that maintenance hadn’t warned her about the situation, this is when her emergency training kicked into gear. The building was evacuated, and security came to attempt an alarm shutdown. Everyone soon realized that this wasn’t a mistake. Something had really set them off.
The fire department was dispatched, and when they arrived, DeRoin took them through the building. “So we went down to the main panel and it said there is something going on in one of the microbiology prep labs upstairs… I looked in the first microbiology prep lab that’s attached to the greenhouse and I kind of looked at the room and it was dark. Then I realized, oh my gosh, that’s smoke.” Smoke was billowing against the windows, and flooding the lab. The fire department sent DeRoin and security outside, so the situation could be handled.
The fire wasn’t as big as the smoke clouds would suggest, but that isn’t what DeRoin noted as the most impressive moment of the day. “No one was messing around in classrooms. Students took it seriously, leaving their backpacks and everything behind… everyone’s emergency training kicked in.”
After the fire was put out and the smoke diminished, Applied Agriculture and Food Studies professor, Richard Crow was left to put together a clean up crew and assess the damage. “We’re going to lose some alfalfa plants, but most of our plants are going to be okay… we had a lot of soot and carbon monoxide and that’s what took out the alfalfa, but it looks like everything else is going to be okay.”
Classes were resumed around ten-thirty that morning, and the impact of the event was left contained in the greenhouse. As for the cause of the fire, Deputy Fire Marshal, Frank Fulton said it’s simple. “It was a short or malfunction of the electronic timing unit.” Or, as Professor Crow put it, “there was a panel on the wall, and now it’s gone.”
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