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Rector Hall fire remembered as day of cooperation, community
What were you doing on April 7, 2002?
The date may not immediately send up alarms in your head, but for certain people associated with Greencastle and DePauw University, it’s seared in their brains.
If you were in town that day, you likely remember it clearly as well.
For that Sunday morning was the Rector Hall fire on the DePauw campus.
Around 7:45 a.m., an electrical fire started in a fourth-floor dorm room, and the blaze soon spread throughout the 86-year-old, four-story structure.
“It’s unreal it’s been 20 years ago,” retired Greencastle Fire Chief Bill Newgent said when contacted by the Banner Graphic Thursday on the 20th anniversary of the fire.
Though the dormitory was lost, the most important factor remembered by those involved is that no students were injured or killed that day.
Of course, that wasn’t a foregone conclusion from the beginning. For firefighters arriving on the scene, the first problem was figuring out exactly how many of the 116 residents were in the building at the time.
“We had no clue how many students were in there,” Newgent recalled. “Our guys were going room to room. They had a count of how many lived in the building, but it happened so early that morning that they didn’t know how many were left in the building. They were going room to room, knocking on doors, just to make sure students were in there.
“I remember my guys rescuing people, putting up a 45-foot ladder and taking students basically out of the windows of those dorm rooms,” he added.
Robert G. Bottoms, then president of the university, arrived on the scene and immediately found Newgent to ask if anyone was injured.
“Bill thought everyone was out but didn’t know if the building would survive,” Bottoms recalled. “I was very relieved, and the city of Greencastle should be very proud of how the Greencastle Fire Department and the surrounding departments performed. Nobody was hurt and the building did not burn to the ground.
“It could have been a lot worse,” Bottoms added.
Ken Owen, now retired as the media relations director for the university, also had nothing but praise for GFD and the surrounding departments.
“They pulled several people out of the building who were dozing and probably would have perished,” Owen said. “I know that with public servants, that’s what they do, but that could have been the worst day in DePauw’s history.”
One thing that’s easy to forget 20 years later is that news wasn’t as instantaneously available in a handheld format in the early years of the new millenium. So for Owen and Bottoms, their cell phones weren’t immediately blowing up with the news.
Owen didn’t even have a cell phone, instead being awakened in his Hendricks County home by a call from a colleague.
“Hey, Ken, you ought to know that Rector Hall is on fire,” he recalled hearing on the other end.
“I literally pulled a Clark Kent,” the one-time journalist (like Superman’s alter ego) said. “I got out of bed, did three pirouettes and I was dressed.”
Bottoms and wife Gwen were much closer to the scene and found out by observation, much like others in the community.
“Gwen and I went to St. Andrew’s Church, so we were at church and we heard all the sirens,” Bottoms said. “When we came out of church, I got in my car and drove over and saw all the fire trucks.”
That isn’t to say the news wasn’t finding its way out to the rest of the world, as news vans from Indianapolis that were passing Owen on his way down U.S. 40 attested.
“They were doing 80, I was doing 70,” Owen recalled.
He arrived to find out news had spread even further.
“When I got to campus, there was a helicopter over the building,” Owen said. “It was on CNN already. Before my feet were even on the ground, it had an international audience.”
Owen’s job was usually to share the news of what was happening on campus. On this day, it was more about controlling misinformation, which isn’t simply a problem of the social media age.
“It was going out over the big outlets that three people were dead,” Owen said. “Job No. 1 was to get correct information out to people.”
The second problem was opening channels of communication. Parents were at home, seeing media reports that were sometimes incorrect, then calling campus only to find that phone lines were jammed, yielding busy signals. Cell phones not yet being ubiquitous, it was the only communication option for many frightened family members.
For that reason, Owen spent his day continually updating the website.
“I was literally sprinting from my office at Charter House back to the Union Building anytime I had new information,” Owen said. “The trick was to get as much information out and get rid of the bad information.”
Even with students out of the building, Newgent had an even trickier and more pressing situation — coordinating the work of a dozen departments and keeping all the responders safe while trying to extinguish the fire.
“That fire was the first major fire that I ever was in command of,” the retired chief said. “It was a lot of good cooperation between all the surrounding emergency departments and our department.”
A dozen fire departments responded, including Putnam County volunteer units as well as aerial trucks from Avon, Brazil and Plainfield adding to Greencastle’s own tower truck.
“We had a lot of resources on the ground,” Newgent said. “The biggest thing I remember from that was the overall cooperation between agencies to make that incident de-escalate to where we could get those students out of there.”
At one point, that cooperation included making sure one of their own got out safely.
“We had a firefighter who was trapped in that building at one time, and they did a fantastic job of getting that firefighter out,” Newgent said. “That’s where our firefighters are supremely trained to focus on extrication of another firefighter or a resident, and then they still go on to their activities of putting the fire out.”
And that was a long task. In fact, it took six hours to put out the blaze, which ultimately ended with much of the fourth floor and roof destroyed by fire, while the remaining three floors were heavily damaged by water and smoke.
Only two firefighters suffered minor injuries in the incident.
In the immediate aftermath, the university looked at rebuilding Rector, which wasn’t entirely lost. However, Bottoms recalls it being a turning point in upperclassman housing at the university.
“We went through a long process when we decided whether to rebuild Rector Hall. We decided not to, and that’s when we started with the apartments around campus,” Bottoms said. “We had already built several of the duplexes there on the edge of campus. They were so popular that we thought, ‘Maybe we don’t want to rebuild the traditional dorm.’”
That was the genesis of Rector Village which, along with the Rector Scholars program, continues to carry the name of Edward and Lucy Rowland Rector.
While those associated with that day will use the word “tragedy” to describe it, they also keep in perspective that only things were lost, not human life.
“That’s one of the largest incidents that happened in Greencastle’s history with the type of occupancy that was in the building,” Newgent said. “I have to give credit to our firefighters because they really did an awesome job.”
He also underscored that the cooperation extended to DePauw and the resources it brought to bear.
“The cooperation from the university was unreal,” Newgent said. “They made sure we had everything we needed.”
University representatives reciprocated this praise.
“You could never say enough about the work that Bill Newgent and the Greencastle Fire Department did, and their neighboring fire departments,” Owen said.
The university was so appreciative of the effort, in fact, that not only did it give the firefighters a banquet a week later, but Bottoms and other administrators were the servers.
“They were just wonderful,” Bottoms said.
Of course, this kind of cooperation didn’t just materialize that daymorning but was forged by the relationship that always exists between city and university. For Bottoms, who raised his children in the city, that meant he wasn’t talking to a stranger or even a simple acquaintance when he spoke to Newgent.
“Bill was a good friend of mine,” Bottoms said. “He and our son, David, had played baseball together growing up.”
Even as the fire was still being extinguished, community connections began manifesting in other ways. Owen specifically recalled Dr. Daryl Hodges opening his optometry office — on Sunday — to Rector Hall residents who might be in need of contacts or other eye care needs.
“Daryl is a great example of someone who just put down what they were doing and said, ‘Hey, if you need help,’” Owen said.
Owen also remembered a sizable donation of clothing from Walmart.
“It sometimes gets murky, but the ties that bind DePauw and the community are so important,” Owen said, “and it was never more important than it was that day.”
Perhaps it was the many smaller, anonymous efforts that were more touching.
“The evening was just this remarkable demonstration of community support,” Owen said. “Car after car after car pulling up to the Union Building dropping things off.”
“One thing I remember is the outreach of the community,” Newgent said. “They set up a room in the Union Building and there were clothes and all kinds of things the people were bringing to help the students.”
For those intimately involved, that’s the legacy of that day — not the sadness, even though it was sad, nor even the buildings constructed in Rector Hall’s place. They remember the way the community and the university came together.
“The community was great,” Bottoms said. “A lot of the students lost everything they had. People brought clothes. We were able to find housing. Professors were very kind to let them make up work.”
“I really want to thank DePauw University,” Newgent said. “They are a huge supporter of the Greencastle Fire Department. Dr. Bottoms always supported the fire department in so many ways.”
“I’ve covered a number of disasters,” Owen said. “I’ve been to the Oklahoma City bombing as a reporter. It’s rare that you see something as devastating as a dorm fire that is seen around the world and had the potential to be the worst day in the university’s history, but then it really brings the community together and turns out to be a day everyone stepped up and showed what the community is all about.”