I just came home from my University after an incident with a fire. There are works going on on the elevators but today there were no workers at the building. Generally, since it is the week between Christmas and New Year, there were only about 4 professors and 10-15 students in the building.
The alarm went of and I was just about to go check if anything happened. Unfortunately, the alarm goes of once in a while for no reason and we have started to ignore it (which is really bad, but is also a fact). At that point, a professor came and opened the door of my lab and I saw dense black smoke behind him.
We went outside form the emergency staircase. Fortunately, this is on the outside of the building and we had no problems with the smoke. However, the inside of the building, especially the upper floors, were full of smoke.
After a while I had to go back inside to take the keys for my car because it was in the way of the fire truck that came. There was no actual fire by then in the elevator but the smoke was really dense. If my office was not right next to the emergency exit, I would not be able to go inside.
Anyway, all went fine (excluding the fact that there is a dark dust on everything on my office and I have to do some serious cleaning tomorrow) but it occurred to me that if this happened at night were even less people are there (and this specific week maybe no one at all), this whole thing could go seriously wrong. I may nag sometimes about my PhD but I have spent almost 10 years of my life in this building and I'd hate to see something bad happen to it...
So, that was the story of my day up to now!
The alarm went of and I was just about to go check if anything happened. Unfortunately, the alarm goes of once in a while for no reason and we have started to ignore it (which is really bad, but is also a fact). At that point, a professor came and opened the door of my lab and I saw dense black smoke behind him.
We went outside form the emergency staircase. Fortunately, this is on the outside of the building and we had no problems with the smoke. However, the inside of the building, especially the upper floors, were full of smoke.
After a while I had to go back inside to take the keys for my car because it was in the way of the fire truck that came. There was no actual fire by then in the elevator but the smoke was really dense. If my office was not right next to the emergency exit, I would not be able to go inside.
Anyway, all went fine (excluding the fact that there is a dark dust on everything on my office and I have to do some serious cleaning tomorrow) but it occurred to me that if this happened at night were even less people are there (and this specific week maybe no one at all), this whole thing could go seriously wrong. I may nag sometimes about my PhD but I have spent almost 10 years of my life in this building and I'd hate to see something bad happen to it...
So, that was the story of my day up to now!
