Mantor Hall residents’ morning alarm has sounded a little different this semester. Faulty fire alarms have caused disruptions for on-campus students, including in the middle of the night.
The fire alarms have been activated 11 times since the start of the spring semester.
“There was one time where the alarms went off around 3 a.m.,” said Jessica Martinez, a freshman majoring in psychobiology, pre-physician assistant. “My friends and I all had a quiz in one of our classes the next morning. We were all so tired the next day because none of us could go back to bed.”
Students are risking their safety by ignoring evacuation policies.
“It’s happened so many times that no one really wants to evacuate anymore because they know it’s fake,” Martinez said. “I still leave because what if it’s not fake one day? But usually half of our floor doesn’t leave.”
Halla Paschold, residence hall coordinator for Mantor Hall and Men’s Hall, sent an email out to all Mantor Hall residents addressing the issue and referring to the Residence Life policy.
“It has come to my attention that individuals have not been evacuating the building when the alarms go off,” Paschold said in an email. “While I understand that the alarms are usually annoying and ill-timed, you MUST evacuate the building every time. Treat each fire alarm as if it were an emergency. State law, as well as residence hall policy, requires that all students leave their room and/or public areas when a fire alarm is sounded. Failure to evacuate during an alarm will subject the student to University disciplinary action and/or civil action.”
While the dorm theory was that they were being pranked, the issue was mechanical rather than personal.
“Since the start of the semester, there have been 11 alarms at Mantor,” said Ted Eichholz, assistant chief of the UNK Police Department. “Six of these alarms have caused the building to evacuate. The other five were minor maintenance issues. Of those, five were maintenance related and one was someone pulling the alarm.”
Michael Cremers, director of Facilities Management and Planning, said that some of the minor maintenance issues were outdated equipment.
“Our local vendor DSI Electronic Systems, Inc. manages those systems for us,” Cremers said. “I believe what we’ve encountered in Mantor Hall is that we need a panel upgrade for the firmware to work out any bugs in the system. We also occasionally identify the detector heads that go bad and in that case, we will be replacing heads as we identify them as faulty.”
The firmware update was installed last week with no reported issues since.
Trelana Daniel, director of Residence Life, said UNK conducts fire safety checks each semester with the campus police department, with additional checks when students are away. They ensure that the alarm systems, sprinklers and emergency notifications function properly.
Antelope Hall, Copeland and the Nebraskan Student Union are also experiencing fire alarm maintenance issues.
In an email on Feb. 17, Daniel said that they were hoping to have the Antelope Hall panel upgraded that day.
