South Campus resident Matt Shaeffer said he questioned campus safety standards after he and other 16 Arundel St. residents waited more than 30 minutes on Oct. 25 for officers to respond to and deactivate a fire alarm.
Shaeffer said the Boston University Police Department and the Boston Fire Department did not respond to the alarm until residents in the building called BUPD to report it.
“It took them about a half hour to get here,” the College of Engineering senior said in an email.
BUPD Lt. Robert Gaffney said it normally takes a very short time for an officer to respond to an alarm, so he was unsure why the response was not immediate.
“It usually takes a minute to two minutes to get on site,” he said. “At 4:30 [p.m.] on a Friday it might take longer depending on traffic, but I don’t understand this half hour thing. It doesn’t click in as being possible.”
Gaffney said when a fire alarm is set off in a BU residence, in most circumstances the BUPD and BFD are notified by a monitor known as a CRT. An officer from both BUPD and the fire department are dispatched to deal with the situation.
Although Shaeffer and other residents claimed that the response took more than a half hour, BUPD records state that the alarm was reported at 2:39:51 p.m. and an officer was on scene at 2:39:55 p.m.
Despite discrepancies over the response time, Gaffney said 16 Arundel St. may be a building where the fire alarm must be manually reported to the fire department instead of being automatically processed through the CRT.
Gaffney said if this is the case, it is possible that the alarm was going off for a while before a student reported the alarm. Once it was called in, the officer was on the scene within seconds.
BFD Public Information Officer Scott Salman said if the station is notified, firefighters will always respond whether or not the building has a history of prank calls.
“Somebody will respond immediately,” he said, “but if it’s a repeat, say Babcock Street for instance, where a student keeps pulling the fire alarm or a student takes the extinguisher and points it at the alarm, well, things like that are considered a nuisance.”
In this case, BUPD records indicate water leaked into the building from the roof and triggered the smoke alarm.
Gaffney said it might have taken a while for someone to call because everyone heard the alarm but assumed that somebody else had already reported it.
“The thing with the alarm,” he said, “is that we always have a B’G electrician arrive and then the B’G fellow will take care of turning off the alarm system, but he may have more difficulty getting there in a timely manner.”
Shaeffer said after the alarm had been sounding for more than 10 minutes, he called B’G to deal with the problem.
“I called B’G during the alarm and they said someone was coming to check it out,” he said. “Judging by this, it was a technical problem … the circuits to the fire department aren’t working correctly.”
Shaeffer said making sure all residents have sufficient alarm systems, which notify either the BUPD or BFD, is a priority.
“Because South is full of old buildings, [the university] should definitely ensure that the alarms and connections to BFD are working properly, and check a couple times a year to ensure that.”
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