It's 4:15 a.m. when the alarm goes off. Shrieking, skull-pounding, the sound blares through students' dreams. Half-asleep, they tumble out of bed. The halls flash with unrelenting strobe lights. RAs pound on doors. Everybody out. Everybody out! They shuffle down the stairs. Ten flights. Outside, it's raining. Sirens sound, and fire engines race up the hill. Here it goes again.
Meanwhile, in his room, Levi Riley rolls up in blankets at the foot of his bed. Huddled in the dark, he waits while an RA glances in the room. Five minutes later, Riley is back to sleep.
In April, the fire department responded to 12 calls to the residence halls. Some weeks in May have seen four false fire alarms per week in McCollum Hall. It's left Riley, Manhattan freshman, feeling fed-up. He and others in the residence hall choose to ignore the late-night alarms -- and the rule requiring students to evacuate.
He's never been caught, Riley said. And in the event of a real fire, well, he's on the second floor.
"I'd just jump out," he said.
It's students like Riley who worry housing and fire department officials, perhaps even more than the pranksters who actually pull the alarms.
Photo courtesy of http://www.housing.ku.edu
"One of our greatest concerns is that students become complacent," said Jennifer Wamelink, associate director for residence life in the Department of Student Housing. "We want them to always evacuate, to always assume it's real."
The recent spike in the number of false alarms is conditioning students to ignore every alarm. That creates more complications in an already dangerous situation, said Fire Marshal Rich Barr. In a real fire, high-rise residence halls are a serious hazard, he said. Their height and huge population makes them difficult places for successful rescue.
For residents, the worst results of fire alarms are sleep deprivation and hours spent shivering on the pavement. Jace Robinson, Oberlin sophomore, recalled one late-night alarm that couldn't be shut off.
"They couldn't fix it for two hours," he said. "So we went to Burger King. We learned it isn't actually open 24-hours."
Loss of sleep (and hunger) can be hard on college students. But others in the Lawrence community also face the costly effects of false alarms.
Photo courtesy of http://www.lawrenceks.org/fire_medical/
The fire department dutifully responds to every alarm in the city, and it's not cheap to keep those green engines going. The average response to any alarm costs around $500 an hour. Checking out a fire alarm at McCollum takes at least one hour, Barr said. When it's responding to a residence hall, the department sends more than one engine, racking up the cost even more. The costs are paid by the average taxpayer in property taxes or, in a student's case, in sales tax.
The University does not pay any portion of the cost of each response. Arranging a contract directly with the University is something he talks about all the time, Barr said, but has never been formally addressed by the University and the city.
"The University isn't going to call for one. Right now they're getting it for nothing," Barr said.
The University does help Station Five, which responds to Daisy Hill, Barr said. The station, located on Iowa Street, is on Endowment property. University Endowment leases the property to the station for $1 per year.
There are other risks involved when a fire alarm goes off.
Whenever a large number of people are evacuated from a building, there is a
chance of injury, said Capt. Schuyler Bailey of the KU Public Safety Office. The KU Public Safety Office also responds to every
University alarm. And the blaring sirens
that race to the rescue have a cost, too.
"Anytime you run red lights and sirens, there's a risk involved," Bailey said. "We're in harm's way, and to a small extent the public is too. When we're running on a false alarm, there's no reason for that risk."
Capt. Schuyler Bailey discusses the consequences of pulling a fire alarm needlessly.
But there's a still greater cost of false fire alarms. Worse than wasted money is wasted time. And time, in a real emergency, is infinitely precious. Sending two engines to the residence halls cuts Station Five's response time in half. It also greatly reduces the overall response capabilities of the entire department.
"There's a social cost involved in rolling up there on alarms," Barr said. "We have simultaneous calls frequently. It's not unusual for a medical unit to be on a call and then get another one, so we have to send a unit from another district out there. Those are needless alarms at the University. The costs are shared by the entire community."
The culprits behind the costly false alarms rarely face the consequences. KU Public Safety and the housing department investigate each alarm, but usually with few results. Students are rarely willing to point fingers, Bailey said, and so the department resorts to educational lectures. The housing department has yet to hit on a practical prevention method.
"We have discussed cameras in the buildings, multiple times," said Wamelink. "But we're always deterred by the sheer number of pull stations. The number of necessary cameras would be huge."
In the end, Levi Riley said, warnings and lectures only go so far.
"We're supposed to be adults," he said. "What can they say?"
And so, caught in a situation with no foreseeable solution,
Riley goes to sleep.
