Alarm to administration

A fire alarm roused Read Center residents from their beds at 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning when, according to the Weather Channel, the temperature was 31 degrees Fahrenheit.\nAfter residence hall staff members were sure the evacuation was complete, they let residents back into their rooms.\nThen, at 8:00 a.m., the fire alarm went off again. The temperature? 29 degrees.\nAt least Sunday's alarms weren't false; in the first case, the alarm was set off by an overheating microwave. Smoke in a kitchenette triggered the second alarm.\nStudents in the dorm have endured a dozen fire alarms this semester. Of those, seven have been between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., and five of those between 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m.\nThis isn't a new situation, as long-term Read residents know. The false alarms have been going off fairly frequently for about two years.\nIn some ways, we suppose, this is a success for RPS, whose goals include building a sense of community in each residence hall. Students in Read certainly have something in common now.\nSarcasm aside, there is a real danger here. In January of 2000, a fire at a dorm in Seton Hall University killed three and left another 60 injured. Many students were slow to leave the dormitory because they had had 18 false fire alarms in the previous few months.\nRead's staff has taken extreme measures to make sure that doesn't happen at their dorm. Each room is checked by a staff member to ensure that everyone has left the building before residents are allowed inside (Incidentally, these searches have resulted in staff discovering alcohol and other violations of residence hall regulations in students' rooms).\nBut those measures can only reduce the chances of someone dying or being seriously injured in a real fire. And they don't address the safety risks to others in Bloomington that come from having the fire department responding to false alarms at Read when there could be real fires elsewhere.\nThe administration has shown little public leadership on this issue. Chancellor Brehm seems more interested in making freshmen live in the dorms than providing them with a comfortable experience. RPS seems more interested in pushing advertisements on its customers than in making sure that they can sleep soundly at night. Both seem more interested in saving money than investing in ways to stop the false alarms.\nSeton Hall's fire should have been a wake-up call to administrators. Instead, administrative lethargy means that it's students who are being woken up -- sometimes twice on Sundays.