Campus fire regulations heating up

All on-campus residents who attended the campus-wide floor meetings when they returned from break, likely heard about the new regulations imposed regarding fire alarms resulting from burning food. To many students, this sounds like an issue which should not be punishable and viewed as an accident.  And, generally speaking, it is accidental. Sleeping residents of the building whose fire alarm went off at 3:22 A.M., due to burning food, and the volunteer firefighters (many of them are students here) who had to respond to this call, were likely unhappy with this situation.
The Poultney Fire Department (PFD) is composed of individuals who volunteer their time; however they must respond to each of these calls regardless of the time of day. Because there is no fire, these calls are not urgent and unnecessary, creating a “boy who cried wolf” effect, as Director of Residence Life Chris Marquart put it.
Thus, they enacted new sanctions for alarms resulting from burnt food. Previously, sanctions were only used for alarms that had been intentionally pulled when there is no fire. The penalty for this is a $1,000 fine for the building, unless the individual responsible was identified in which case that individual receives the entire $1,000 fine and is suspended. There are concerns throughout campus and from the fire department’s perspective regarding the effectiveness of this new policy. It was made clear by Chris Marquart that the goal of this new policy is not to punish, but to fix, a serious issue which endangers students and takes up the time of volunteers. Additionally, the fines from the second and third offenses will be donated to the Poultney Fire Department.
From the perspective of a member of the PFD, it is believed that that the punishments do not effectively increase in severity and should be based on incidents within a building, instead of on a floor-by-floor basis in order to shed light on the seriousness of the issue. Additionally, there is frustration regarding the fines for burnt food incidents being donated to the fire department since a pulled alarm is more of an unnecessary annoyance with a higher fine that the fire department does not see any of the proceeds from.
Students who are off the meal plan have legitimate concerns that they will be inconvenienced by the potential closing of their hub. One anonymous student feels that there is no way that this will solve the problem. She believes that these incidents are usually the result of intoxication, thus the party involved is not likely to be thinking of any consequences at the time and if a hub is closed, the residents can simply migrate to a different floor or building.
According to the Director of Residence Life, this is the policy which was implemented at the end of the fall semester and alleviated any further incidents. Although only two weeks into the semester, the campus has experienced no incidents of burnt food related fire alarms, whereas the numbers from last semester suggest that if the same rate of occurrence were to happen this semester, than there should have been one already. if and when this situation arises in the coming weeks, there is sure to be more debate regarding the policy.

Short URL: http://www.themountaineer.org/?p=1172

Posted by Danielle Phillips on Jan 22, 2010 Filed under College. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry