False alarms common during exam time

How quickly do you think you could evacuate a VCU classroom building during an emergency?

“I think it’d be easy to find an exit,” said Rob Buchanan, 19, a physics major. “I would hope if you could get into a building you could find your way out.”

Fire alarms, like exits, seem easy to find for some students.

“Most emergencies that we deal with in classroom buildings are associated with fire,” said Col. Willie Fuller, VCU’s chief of police.

The police recorded only two fire alarm calls in the T. Edward Temple Building since Jan. 1 until a few weeks ago, when four alarms were pulled shortly after 1 p.m. on Feb. 19.

Lt. David Welch said one of those four alarms sounded in the Temple building and the other three sounded in Oliver Hall. Welch said police charged a student with falsely summoning a fire apparatus in connection with the final alarm pulled in Oliver Hall.

Students, he said, were out of classes for about 45 minutes while police and fire officials investigated the causes of the alarms.

“When a lot of these happen, everyone thinks of one word: exams,” he said.

John Geerdes, Temple building manager, said the police respond to every fire alarm.

“The VCU police show up as well as the Richmond fire department,” he said. “Their system is automatically notified as well as the VCU police’s. They come in and determine whether it’s a true alarm or not and proceed from there.”

During a fire alarm, Geerdes said, he coordinates a staff who clears Temple’s floors of people and assists those who need help exiting the building. If his staff cannot check a floor, he tells the fire department, which inspects all the floors.

“Before they (fire officials) let you back in, they have to actually physically clear the building,” Geerdes said.

Geerdes and Fuller said prank alarms are common, especially around exam time.

“As we approach midsemester exam and final exam times,” Fuller said, “we try to get our officers to be seen more frequently to deter that.”

Regardless, Geerdes identified false alarms as his most difficult problem when it comes to evacuating the Temple building.

“You get one or two false alarms a day or one or two or three a week, and people start to get complacent,” he said. “And it’s not a good thing. But every time it goes off, you leave because you never know when it might be real.”