Fire Trends on Campus

By Rachel Johnson

An earsplitting siren cuts through a quiet dorm hall. Lights flash, perturbed residents leave their rooms, and the Oxford Fire Department arrives on the scene.

Almost all University of Mississippi students have experience the confusion and annoyance of a false fire alarm in their dorm or an academic building. But many students remain confused as to what happens when these alarms accidentally go off and what affect false alarms have on the Oxford Fire Department.

The Oxford Fire Department says 42% percent of the calls they answered in 2009 were buildings on the Ole Miss campus. By the numbers, the fire department responded to 368 alarms (approximately 1000 total in the city), 31 which were actual fires or smoke, 337 were false alarms or alarms tripped by conditions such as steam, temper

ature change, etc which do not emanate from an actual fire.

“The smoke detectors and heat detectors are very sensitive. Something as simple as a spider crawling across the photo eye sometimes can cause an alarm to go off and you really can’t say that’s a false alarm or a malfunctioning alarm because the alarm is working, it’s just not supposed to detect something like that,” Deputy Chief David Duchaine explained.

When of the stations respond to a call from the university, they automatically send out a three company response. Duchaine explained this means nine of the 16 firefighters on duty leave the station on two engines, which pump water, and one truck, which has a 100 foot ladder. If the alarm is not for an actual fire, the station’s resources are spread thin and could affect their ability to quickly respond to an actual fire.

When the Oxford Fire Department responds to alarms at the dorms, Duchaine said it is most likely a prank someone has pulled which has set off an alarm, whereas alarms in the academic buildings are usually set off by maintenance work or air units.

False alarms intentionally pulled or set off seem to be caused by freshman, Duchaine observed, which is logical since the majority of students living in on-campus housing are freshmen. “The dorms are the ones we have most of the pranks, and generally speaking it will be the freshman, though not always,” he said.

Kincannon Hall Director Chris Lewandowski said, “I don’t know if you want to call it luck or vigilant but we have not been having many prank alarms. We have had one real alarm this semester when someone was cooking something.”

Stockard Hall Director Josh Gaisser said that prank alarms have not happened as often in his hall as last year. He said this fall there have only been five or six pulled, compared to over twenty last year. Gaisser attributed this change to a pledge not to pull fire alarms which all residents had to sign, and harsher punishments for all residents when an alarm is pulled.

“The way we sanction them is if we don’t catch the person who pulled it, the entire hall looses visitation privileges. It sounds extreme, but if you take privileges away from the entire hold, it angers people enough to hold their friends accountable,” said Gaisser.

Gaisser believes this new system has had a tremendous affect on decreasing prank alarms, and has built a strong community of residents holding each other accountable.

Though students may protest, leaving the building when an alarm, prank or not, goes off is a crucial part of setting everyone’s mindsets in case of a real fire. In the residence halls, RAs knock on doors as they exit the building to make sure everyone has left.

Duchaine said, “Believe it or not, we have people who hide from us, who hide under beds, that hide in closets, who just don’t want to leave because they know it’s a false alarm. Those are the same people that we would be looking for in a real fire.”

Even though prank alarms and alarms without a fire present are the majority of calls which bring the Oxford Fire Department to campus, 31 of the 368 fire alarms on campus in 2009 were for actual fires.

According to Duchaine, often times these calls will be for grass or mulch that has caught fire from a cigarette butt but also smoke or fires from stoves commonly trigger alarms.