Fire prevention, not public annoyance

By AEN

It’s only been a week, and I’m already complaining. Are we surprised? No, but I think my complaint is a valid one. After a recent fire alarm, many upset Village Townhouse residents are looking for answers.

Fire alarms are designed to go off if there is smoke, indicating a fire in a building. As much as technology has its faults, three different days the alarm going off in a span of five days has frustrated the masses. The final straw wasn’t the third alarm that went off last Saturday night, but the drill throughout the entire Village Townhouses that was run the night before, beginning with buildings A, B and C at 10 p.m.

Amelia Kuhn, a sophomore resident of Building A, spoke out with an email that was sent to Mark Piatkowski, the director of housing at Canisius. Under New York state fire code, a college has to do three drills throughout the academic year with one being after sunset. Everyone agrees that fire drills are important, and Kuhn makes that clear in her email, but with the sun setting just before 8 p.m., there is no need to do a drill “when people are winding down or going to sleep” as Kuhn puts it. 

The email made many excellent points, and the key point involved a registered emotional support pet. One of Kuhn’s roommates, Sienna Stepien, has her cat in the apartment, and the experience caused trauma to an animal that has barely adjusted to a completely new living environment. Stepien held her cat along the front entrance of Building A where, if the cat was let go, she would potentially run into a heavily trafficked road, Main Street. Even at 10 p.m., this is a dangerous situation for everyone.

Kuhn talked with a campus safety officer during the drill, and he told her that they “wanted to make sure the alarms were working.” Normally, this would not be a problem, ignoring the time of night, however, the alarms in the same buildings went off earlier in the week, causing a 40-minute annoyance for the residents. The worst part: it was a false alarm, so the alarm itself was working.

One solution is giving a time range when a fire drill will happen, at least to people who have animals that need special care in a case like this. Obviously, residents can’t know the exact time when a drill would happen as it would defeat part of the purpose of the drill. However, with an animal that needs special care, the solution should be taken into consideration. Letting campus safety do their job and protect us students is the goal, but campus safety can work with students to better communicate. After all, the motto of campus safety is to serve and protect the educational environment of Canisius University.