Today, at approximately 7:45 p.m., Harbin Hall was evacuated after a fire broke out. The fire was caused by students cooking (Editor’s note: Cooking food) in the third floor common room.

According to Department of Public Safety officers at the scene, the fire did not set off the building’s sprinkler system, but firefighters brought fans into the building to dissipate the smoke. Students from all floors of the building were forced to leave, and the residents subsequently received an email from Ashley Kockler, the Harbin Hall Director, telling them that they would not be able to re-enter the building until 9:15 p.m. at the earliest.

Below is the email students received from Kockler.

Read the rest of this entry »

The failure of Harbin Hall’s audible fire alarm system was caused by “inadvertent human error,” according to Chief Administrative Officer Spiros Dimolitsas.

“A technician failed to properly reset the system after conducting a monthly test of a fire pump on Friday, October 22,” he wrote in a memo addressed to the University community. “The system was working on Wednesday, October 20, during our regularly scheduled evacuation drill and again on Thursday, October 21 when a smoke alarm triggered an evacuation.”

The evacuation, which began after Public Safety officers discovered students producing DMT in the dormitory’s ninth-floor, was described as “chaos everywhere” by Ted Helfrich (MSB ’14), an eighth-floor resident.

“They tried to pull the fire alarms, but they weren’t going off,” he said.

Read the rest of this entry »