When Annie Geasa returned from work to her dorm at Myles Annex Thursday morning, she was not allowed back into the building and did not receive information about the situation.
“The power went out at night. My roommates were evacuated,” said Geasa, a sophomore in the College of Communication. “First of all, the reason we were upset to begin with was the fire alarm didn’t even wake them up. They were stuck in the building for about fifteen minutes after it had initially gone off.”
Geasa said she and her roommates were upset by the inconvenience, but they were more concerned by the lack of communication about the situation in the building.
“They only told us that there was a power outage, and everyone knew that it was more than that,” she said. “When there were six fire trucks outside of my window, they continued to tell us it was only a power outage, and that caused a lot more chaos than there needed to be had they just told us what was actually going on.”
After a power outage early Thursday morning prompted the building’s generators to go on, workers from the utilities company Eversource on site noticed a fire in the manhole near Myles Standish Hall, said Boston University spokesman Colin Riley. The fire activated the building’s fire alarm and prompted an evacuation.
“When there’s an outage, our buildings’ generators go on, so light safety systems, lighting, heating, etcetera remain on, and we have BU staff, police, the facilities people, residence life people in to make sure everything was working and fine, which it was until around 7 in the morning,” he said.
BU Residence Life prepares for these types of situations as best they can, Riley said.
“Unfortunately, with this record snow storm and the melting snow, it’s caused a number of these incidents across the city,” he said.“It’s keeping utility crews working round the clock to address them. We are well prepared for them.”
Winny Ning, a resident of Myles Standish, said the loss of electricity made it difficult to navigate the hallways or charge electronics.
“It was really creepy,” said Ning, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Basically, we couldn’t do anything in the dark, so we just went to bed. Wi-Fi was off too. So everyone was trying to charge their phones with their laptops, but eventually those died too.”
Ning said she remembers smelling and seeing smoke in her hallway.
Amelia Graber-Lipperman, a sophomore in the School of Education, said she didn’t make it to class on Thursday morning.
“I missed my morning class unfortunately because of [the incident]. I was wearing my pajamas and didn’t have my backpack or anything, so I didn’t really feel like going to class,” she said.
In an email to Myles Annex residents, Director of Residence Life David Zamojski said rooms at Hotel Commonwealth were available to those affected on Thursday due to a lack of heat and hot water in the building.
Seventy-six students checked into the hotel and stayed one night only, Riley said.
Ning said Residence Life should have been more explicit in their communication with the students.
“We didn’t know when we could come back until we heard from other people. They could’ve texted us and told us what was going on because we were just sitting there, waiting,” she said. “We didn’t get any notifications. We only got information through the BU account on Twitter and through friends telling us what they had heard.”
Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore apologized for the way the situation was approached in a Friday email to students.
“In retrospect, we relied, more so, on a ‘word-of-mouth’ approach to keeping you informed. We’ll learn from this and commit ourselves to using multiple communication approaches as we handle ongoing emergencies,” he said in the email. “I hope the slowness of our response does not damage the spirit of community I hope we can continue to build.”
Graber-Lipperman said the troubles that lead to the evacuation weren’t BU’s fault and that the situation was handled well.
“They were testing fire alarms again today [Friday] just to make sure everything was in order. Dean Elmore sent out an apology email, even though it wasn’t his or the school’s fault at all, which was almost unfortunate because I feel like if it had been the school’s fault, they would’ve been able to remedy it even quicker,” she said.
Ultimately, Geasa said, BU let students down by failing to communicate with them.
“They made no effort to communicate with us. They mitigated the situation to seem so much smaller than it was,” she said. “In the Annex, we’ve had a lot of issues and just things that haven’t been fixed and they always say to just file reports, but I’ve filed so many reports and put in housing requests and they just haven’t fixed things, and there are a lot of things that should be fixed because they’re dangerous.”
