A fire alarm that went off in the Landis Academic Center Monday – triggering evacuations in that building, the adjoining Wilson Library and College of Business and Public Management building – turned out to be a false alarm.
“There’s a trouble in the system for a smoke detector on the first floor. And it triggered it, but it was not an actual fire or a test,” Campus Safety Officer Laura Avalos said.
Avalos said those buildings share one alarm system, so when an alarm is triggered in one, it will sound in all three as a precaution because they are so close to one another.
Provost Jonathan Reed said it might have been either the heat or certain particles that caused the troubled duct detector to sound.
Campus Safety arrived at the scene about a minute after the alarms went off. The fire department got there about two minutes after that, Avalos said.
Students waited in Sneaky Park while the fire department did a walk-through to determine it was a false alarm before giving the green light.
Although there was no real danger, some students said they were shaken up by the incident.
“I was actually scared because of everything that is going on,” said senior behavioral science major Carolina Lopez.
“I was just looking around to see if anybody was holding something that they were not supposed to.”
Others seemed less concerned.
“I just assumed it would go off for no good reason, so I just packed up and left,” said senior kinesiology major Zach Boran.
—Celene Vargas
