Kitchen fire threatens South Campus

The shrill sound of a fire alarm that every dorm resident dreads hearing went off in male Dorm 32 shortly after 9 p.m. last Monday. This time it was not a drill.

Quad residents swarmed out of the smoke-filled building and into the surrounding parking lots. The wide-eyed, confused students stood far enough away to escape the smoke, but close enough to watch the building as smoke began pouring out of the windows.

“There was smoke rolling out of the front door even though it was closed,” first-year grad student Sean Dalton said.

Dalton had been visiting a friend when the fire alarm sounded. He and the residents of the dorm initially believed it to be just another fire drill. They soon discovered that there was a fire in the kitchen on the first floor of the quad.

“The alarm started going off, but we just thought it was a drill,” sophomore Andrew Walters said. “Then smoke started filling the stairwell and the RAs screamed for us to get out.”

Mark Dickson, one of the dorm’s Resident Assistants (RA), ran into the kitchen to find out what had triggered the alarm. The sight that greeted him in the smoke-filled kitchen was far from what he expected.

The fire was a result of an attempt to deep-fry Kit-Kat bars gone wrong, according to Dalton.

“This pot exploded in flames and then there was fire on the walls and stove,” Dickson said.
As students evacuated the building, several of them got a glimpse of the kitchen and the rapidly growing fire.

“There were flames engulfing the cabinets,” sophomore Wesley Foster said.

Several of the guys who were on the upper levels of the dorm were unaware of the fire until they reached the stairwell. As they attempted to leave the building, the smoke continued to build.

“As soon as you got down into the thick of the smoke, you couldn’t see. You could barely breathe,” sophomore Charlie Allocco said.

“Mark, the RA, ran in with a fire extinguisher but ran back out and screamed for everyone to get out,” Walters said.

Armed with fire extinguishers, Dickson and senior Cody Burke worked to put the fire out three times before it remained fully extinguished. Their quick action ensured the full evacuation of the building and minimized the damages caused by the fire.

Lynchburg Fire Department responded to the calls placed by the students and was on the scene within 10 minutes, according to Walters.

Eleven emergency vehicles responded to the emergency call. The multiple fire trucks and ambulances driving through campus grabbed the attention of more than a few curious onlookers.

“I heard the fire sirens and I opened up my blinds and there were lights flashing everywhere,” freshman Lindsay Crawford said.

She and freshman Lauren Baugniet watched the event unfold from the safety of dorm 33, across the parking lot from the burning male dorm.

“It looked like it was really bad,” Baugniet said. “There were like four or five fire trucks, and then they kept coming. It was a huge response.”

Sophomore Daniel Moore, who lives next door to dorm 32, was returning from the computer lab when he saw the emergency vehicles heading in the direction of South Campus.

“I was just thinking the whole time, ‘Don’t be my dorm. Don’t turn there,’” Moore said.

After the safety of the dorm was determined, students were allowed to return to what they had been doing before the alarm sounded, minus the deep-frying.

Dickson is proud of how well the guys in his dorm reacted to the initial alarm and then the fire itself.

“Everyone got out pretty quickly once they realized it was real,” Dickson said.