Residents of 726 Commonwealth Ave. said they could barely hear the fire alarms in their dormitory after a small fire on Oct. 11 which disrupted asbestos building material.
The fire started on the roof of the boiler room in the exterior courtyard of the building and burned down into the basement, said Thomas Gorham, director of campus operations for Boston University Environmental Health and Safety and a campus fire safety officer.
Fire alarms in 726 Comm. Ave. went off at 3:30 a.m., but the alarms did not sound in 722 Comm. Ave. or 728 Comm. Ave, which connect to 726. The cause of the fire is undetermined, Gorham said.
Senior Safaa AlRamahi was awoken by her roommate who heard someone outside of 726 Comm. Ave. yelling “fire.”
“The number of people that were standing outside during the fire was not reflective of the number of people that live inside 722 and 726,” AlRamahi said. “It seemed like a lot of people just didn’t wake up to hear [the alarm].”
BU Facilities is looking into residents’ complaints about not hearing the alarms from their rooms. The system passed quarterly inspections and is functioning per code, according to Gorham.
Senior Sophia Barlett, a resident at 726 Comm. Ave., wrote in a statement to The Daily Free Press that “it didn’t sound like an alarm going through the entire building.” She said the alarm sounded “pretty faint” from her room.
Madeline Oberding, a junior who also lives at 726 Comm. Ave., said she was already awake when the alarm went off but couldn’t hear it very well.
Oberding said she smelled smoke, heard footsteps and saw people running, so she woke up her roommates to evacuate.
“It was so weird because we couldn’t hear [the alarm] inside of the room,” AlRamahi said.
AlRamahi told a maintenance worker that she was unable to hear the alarm from her room, and he told her residents are not supposed to have alarms in the bedrooms. She said a member of BU Facilities went into her room the morning after the fire and agreed the alarm was not audible.
Electricians entered all rooms at 726 Comm. Ave. to install additional fire alarms on Oct. 15 and Oct. 16. AlRamahi said BU Facilities added an alarm to her apartment hallway after the fire.
The fire damaged some asbestos-containing building material in the ceiling of the boiler room, Gorham said. As required by law, Environmental Health and Safety sent an emergency notice requesting the state of Massachusetts to stabilize the asbestos on the day of the fire.
A fully licensed contractor was hired for the asbestos abatement. The project is monitored by an abatement-monitoring company, which samples the air during and after the project, Gorham said.
Gorham said he expects the work to be completely finished this Friday, Oct. 25, but repairs could stretch into next week.
BU Police Department, BU Facilities Management and Operations and Boston Fire Department were all on scene.
BFD cleared the building for re-entry by 4:40 a.m. the same night, according to an email sent to residents by Hilary Caron, interim director of residence life.
When Oberding returned to her apartment, she said there was a smoke smell that lasted until the next day. Oberding has a lung disease and said she had difficulty breathing even after the smoke was gone because of some of the air fragrances used to clear the smell.
Oberding was moved to South Campus for the weekend after her parents called BU.
AlRamahi said when she and her roommates returned after the building was deemed safe for re-entry, their apartment was still full of smoke. AlRamahi has asthma and said she had difficulty breathing in the room.
“We went downstairs and we asked [BFD], ‘Are you sure you got the fire?’ Our apartment is full of smoke. What do we do?” AlRamahi said. “And they were like, ‘We’ll just open the windows.’”
