Students have expressed frustration with campus fire alarms. Last semester, students reported various false fire alarms going off in campus housing. This semester, students are still facing the same issues.
“So, in the first week of school, it went off about three times a day, but it went off every single night in the middle of the night,” said Kennedy Ozbun, sophomore social work major. “So, like 11 p.m., around that time. And Public Safety has no idea when they’re going off because we have one of the older buildings, so they don’t know who set it off. They don’t know when it goes off, and they don’t show up unless we call them and tell them that it is going off.”
She said the issue has been brought up to Public Safety.
“We brought it up to them several times and asked them what we can do about it,” Ozbun said. “They just show up to the apartments, and they say that they’re gonna sniff around and see if they smell anything burning, and then they just shut them off.”
Emily Lang, freshman marketing major, said the fire alarms have affected her sleep.
I need my sleep. I was already in bed, so I had to get out of bed.”
— Emily Lang, freshman marketing major
“I know one person was in the shower when it happened,” she said. “So they had to rush out of the shower.”
Students said more checks should be done to fix the issue.
“I think they need to do some sort of system check and get in the process of updating our fire alarms, because a few weeks after all of ours were going off, they went off over at O’Bannon, and the fire department was there immediately,” Ozbun said. “However, every time that ours go off, nobody knows if they go off. We’ve never had the fire department show up or anything else.”
“I think there could be more routine checks on the front, like the smoke detectors and stuff in the apartments,” said Makana Gabrel, junior psychology and pre-occupational therapy major.
Sam Preston, assistant director of Public Safety, confirmed some of the dorms are not directly connected to Public Safety, and it is something they are working on.
That was a big improvement project for the University. It’s not complete yet, but that’s a project that’s been worked on.”
— Sam Preston, assistant director of Public Safety
“I think it’s about a $4 million project that the university is working on to make sure that that is taken care of,” Preston said.
He said if students hear a fire alarm, they should call Public Safety immediately.
