Friday, January 21, 2000
Area schools say dorm students ready for fires
Precautions range from drills to smoke detectors
BY PHILLIP PINA and CINDI ANDREWS
The Cincinnati Enquirer
One day this fall, a group of Miami University freshmen had to crawl through a smoke-filled hallway to escape their dormitory.
This was a drill. In light of a number of dormitory fires the past few years, including Wednesday's fatal blaze at New Jersey's Seton Hall University, the Miami exercise is a welcomed precaution to those who live in its dormitories.
Miami University began last fall requiring freshmen in its 36 dorms to take part in a drill in which a hallway is filled with “safe smoke” — a nontoxic fluid that goes through a machine to produce smoke. The drill gives students a realistic idea of what to expect and how to react in a fire, said Miami spokeswoman Holly Wissing.
“It was really an eye-opening experience because I don't think anyone realizes how dark, how confusing, it can be,” said Miami junior Guy Temple, 20, of Oak Ridge, Tenn. The Wilson Hall resident adviser said five or six people at a time had to crawl down a hallway and around a corner to an exit.
“It was kind of scary to think about if that really happened.”
Besides Seton Hall's tragedy, where three people died and 62 others where injured in a dorm fire, there have been a number of other recent campus blazes.
One person died and another was injured in a Sept. 18, 1998, fire at Murray State University in Kentucky. Fourteen people were hurt in a Sept. 24, 1998, dorm fire at Bluffton College, near Lima, Ohio. And one person suffered second-degree burns in an April 30, 1998, fire in a Northern Kentucky University dorm room.
At the University of Cincinnati, as with many colleges across the country, many of the dormitories were built during the 1960s and 1970s. Many do not have sprinkler systems. What the schools offer is a mixture of prevention programs and alarm systems to keep students safe, said Greg Hand, UC spokesman.
Of UC's seven residence halls, four have been fitted with sprinkler systems, he said. As for the rest, the school is wrestling with the decision to either upgrade the current buildings, or tear them down and build new ones.
All the UC buildings have fire alarms, and students are given fire safety tips and warnings about false alarms during orientation programs, Mr. Hand said. The school prosecutes those caught setting the alarms off without cause.
False alarms really are not that big a problem at UC, or any of Cincinnati's other campuses, said Cincinnati District Fire Chief Paul Weber. Occasionally his department will get a run to a dormitory on a fake alarm, mostly at the beginning of the school year, but the school makes an effort to weed out the troublemakers, he said.
At Thomas More College, there is no fire prevention program students are put through, spokesman Bob Edwards said. But the school does use smoke detectors and fire alarms to warn students of danger. Residence hall staff are trained on what to do in the event of a fire, Mr. Edwards said, and are responsible for doing emergency room-to-room inspections to make sure everyone has evacuated.
At Seton Hall, there were reports of many students ignoring fire alarms after a number of recent false warnings. Schools and businesses have invested millions of dollars to provide the best warning systems to protect students, said Miami Fire Marshal Rich Dusha. It is up to students, he said, to use the information.
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