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False alarms, campus fire runs irk Council, fire chief
This is no false alarm. City officials are getting hot and bothered about all the false alarms the Greencastle Fire Department regularly responds to these days.
Heck, all you need do to keep up on the issue is check the fire runs in the Putnam Scanner in the Banner Graphic each edition.
In fact, as you are reading this, there is a pretty good chance Greencastle firefighters have already responded to a false alarm today or soon will be summoned out unnecessarily. After all, Monday was the 289th day of the year and at the end of September, GFD had already totaled 252 false alarms. False alarms totaled 350 for 2016.
And a great number of those continue to involve the DePauw University campus.
Chief John Burgess’ report does not include a listing of the origin of the false alarms, but it does show an interesting correlation between the number of false alarms and the number of fire runs to campus.
For example, 34 false alarms were recorded for September, while firefighters went to DPU dorms 31 times and fraternities or sororities twice. Year-to-date, there have been 252 false alarms, while GFD has made 149 trips to dorms and 28 visits to fraternities and sororities during the same timeframe.
“If memory serves me correct,” Chief Burgess told the City Council during its October meeting, “for September we had no actual fires (on campus).”
Of the 31 DePauw responses, he said 14 involved cooking, two were canceled en route, one was an alarm malfunction and one involved apparent overuse of hair products, while the others were of unknown origin. The two fraternity responses both involved smoking, the chief said.
Cooking has been a problem for a number of years, Burgess noted.
“For the last 22 years, the start of the school year has always been busy for us. You’ve got a bunch of young kids just learning to cook,” he said, which can lead to a number of problems that ultimately end up with a big, red fire engine sitting in front of the dormitory or frat house.
The majority of campus false alarms, Burgess noted, have been coming from Humbert Hall or Bishop Roberts Hall, which are considered first-year student dorms.
The good news, Chief Burgess told the Council, is that none of those runs has involved malicious pulling of fire alarms, something that was a recurring problem a couple of years ago.
“Knock on wood, we haven’t had any pull station issues,” Burgess said. “We’re doing very well with that right now.”
Council President Adam Cohen, a DePauw faculty member, pointed out that the university still has not addressed the overall fire alarm issue.
“It’s still a problem,” Cohen said. “It costs us money. And it’s a safety issue. By the time the second alarm goes off at night, students quit rolling out of bed.”
And that can create the dreaded boy-who-cried-wolf nightmare.
“The Rector (Hall) fire is a faded memory now for even the staff at DePauw,” Councilman Dave Murray interjected, alluding to the April 7, 2002 fire that displaced all 116 Rector students and gutted the 86-year-old structure -- miraculously all without injury to a single student.
That fire, however, is why Greencastle fire officials will continue to take all fire alarms seriously until they have reason to believe otherwise, Chief Burgess assures.
No action was taken by the City Council on the false alarm issue at this time.