Fire alarm woes persist at villages

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Tamara Monroe

UP IN SMOKE - DTAV resident Matt Plessis, 21, cooks up a bag of popcorn in his microwave. Residents of DTAV and Patch Hall have been accidentally setting off fire alarms with their cooking and will have to pay $150 per alarm set off.

Alarms are sounding, lights are flashing and students are evacuating. What’s the emergency? Someone burned their French fries.

Such commotion is a common occurrence around the Doris Twitchell Allen Village this year. In fact, fire alarms have gone off at least five times, continuing last year’s tradition of frequent evacuations.

So far this year, the smoke, fires and subsequent alarms have all been caused by cooking, according to Orono Fire Chief Lorin LeClair. Cited amongst the reasons for the fires are burned cooking oil, burned French fries and burned food in the ovens.

Some blame the frequent alarms on the placement of smoke detectors over the ovens.

Fire alarms had been going off “every day for the first week,” according to DTAV and Edith Patch Hall Resident Director Matt Lord. It happened “only a few times last week as people become more careful,” he said.

Part of the reason for the increased care could be the $150 fine students will be charged for setting off a fire alarm. The fine is in no way related to the Orono Fire Department, Chief LeClair said. There is no fee at this time for false alarms. The fine is administered by Housing Services, which will now count fire alarms caused by cooking as dorm damage. The student who causes the alarm will be fined.

Housing Director Andrew Matthews said the fine is not part of a scheme to “stick a cost on a student.”

“The reasons for the fine are basically based on safety issues,” he said. “A fine is generated when the tripping of the alarms, either by pulling it or having it be electronically tripped, is based on the fire department’s assessment of the alarms as a ‘malicious or negligent act.’”

The fine is a kind of “disincentive” to being careless with cooking, Matthews said. The fines are designed to “educate people about responsibility” and give residents “incentive not to burn food,” he said.

The university contributes funds to the Orono Fire Department every year, and those expenditures would decrease if people were more careful and caused fewer fires, Matthews said.

The university has had some serious fires in its past. There have been large fires in Somerset, Gannett, Knox, and most recently, a fire in Hancock Hall that caused 219 students to be displaced and more than $2 million in damage.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2003, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.