Fatal fire should raise alarm bells with students and parents
The horrific fire that killed at least nine people in Huntington, W. Va, over the weekend — including three Marshall University students and two siblings who were visiting a student — comes almost exactly seven years after another terrible campus fire, the one that killed three students at Seton Hall University.
According to Campus Firewatch, a newsletter devoted to fire safety, there have been 97 campus-related fire deaths across the country since 2000. Almost 90 percent of the fires occurred in off-campus and Greek housing, with four common factors identified in the fatal fires: lack of automatic fire sprinklers, missing or disabled smoke alarms, careless disposal of smoking materials and impaired judgment from alcohol consumption. News reports about the latest fire in West Virginia suggest there was no sprinkler system in the building, which housed a number of Marshall students. In several of the apartments, according to reports, there were no smoke detectors.
So, no time is better than the present to remind students, parents, and university officials that there is a lot they can do to reduce the risk of fire. It may be too late this year to move into a building with an automatic fire sprinkling system, but consider it essential — as much as wireless Internet connection — when you sign up for housing next year. That’s the advice of Ed Comeau, publisher of Campus Firewatch.
And with or without sprinklers, make sure you have working smoke detectors on each and every level of the house and in each bedroom. Better still, pay extra for a wireless interconnected smoke alarm system; if one goes off, all go off so you don’t have to wait for the smoke to reach your room to know there’s trouble.
Other tips from Campus Firewatch and Ed Comeau:
- Take each alarm activation seriously and evacuate. If an alarm is being activated needlessly by cooking or by a shower, relocate the alarm, do not disable it.
- Always know two ways out of the building you are in, whether it is your house, apartment, residence hall, movie theater or nightclub.
- Make sure you have a fire extinguisher and, more importantly, know how to use it before the fire breaks out.
- Use ashtrays and dispose of the cigarette butts properly; a number of fires have started because cigarettes have been carelessly discarded.
- After a party, check the seat cushions on couches and chairs for cigarettes that may lie smoldering, waiting to start a fire in the middle of the night.
- Do not overload extension cords which may cause them to overheat.
- Know what to do in a cooking fire; usually the simple approach—covering a fire with a lid---is the best; adding water to an oil fire on the other hand, could cause the fire to explode and spread.
