On both September 19 and 30, Thayer fire alarms were only audible in stairwells and certain floors. Thayer Hall residents expressed concern over the lack of response from floor fire alarms after these two incidents.
Christopher Hill, the vice president of operations for the Physical Plant Department, assured residents that the fire alarms are functioning as intended and that 9/11 caused a change in codes for building evacuations.
“If a fire is on floor three, the floor above and below alarms go off,” Hill said. “The problem that we have is, they’re telling [occupants] that those are the floors you evacuate. If you’re on the fifth floor, you might hear an alarm lightly, but you’re not supposed to evacuate.”
Hill said that the fire alarm should not go off on a floor until smoke reaches that floor or the fire department comes in, assesses the situation and decides to pull the fire alarm for the entire building. He also said that he believes the confusion on other floors comes from the echoing of the alarms in the building stairwells.
“If somebody would’ve opened up their stairwell door, they would’ve heard it [the alarm] echoing through the stairwell louder,” said Hill.
Nadezhda Zaitseva, a funeral services major living on the fourth floor of Thayer Hall, said that they could “not really” hear either fire alarm from their room.
“I heard the alarm,” Zaitseva said. “But if I didn’t listen to it, I wouldn’t have noticed it. You can hear everything through the doors, but through the stairs, not really.”
Former residents also said that this is not a new concern. Kyu Franz is a sophomore funeral services major who lived in Thayer Hall during their freshman year. Franz said they were “shocked” to learn they had played a video game through the entirety of a fire alarm.
“When I took a break to check my phone, I got a Snapchat from my friend asking if I was okay,” Franz said. “He said that there had been a fire in Thayer and that they’d evacuated the building. I said I hadn’t heard anything. Mind you, this is a dorm room in which I could hear the crosswalks beep from eight stories above the street.”
Residents also voiced their concerns about the lack of information on what to do in a real emergency.
“The only thing I knew was that I should probably get out of the building,” Zaitseva said. “But not like a meeting location or anything.”
According to Hill, there are plans to conduct a fire drill “very soon”.“We try to wait so that students are somewhat accustomed to their schedule,” said Hill. “What we found is that [when] we do it too close to the start of school, students don’t take it seriously.”
“I think the problem is there’s some miscommunication about how the fire alarm should work,” said Hill. “But once again I reemphasize that it’s the floors above and below.”
