The high-pitched, deafening squeal of Brandeis’ alarms has, much to the dismay of residential students, become a part of everyday life. Alarms blare intermittently around campus, while almost every day you will hear a fire alarm set off in the southern residence quads. Such frequent false alarms from microwaves and cigarettes (excluding the purposeful drills) have created a sense of indifference toward the alarms: the boy who cried wolf scenario. This mounting concern, should current conditions continue, may turn out to be a significant problem.
In the Village, Ridgewood and Ziv, it has become rare to see a week pass without a fire alarm. Microwave mishaps in a region littered with kitchens, smoking too close to the buildings and other careless mistakes are setting them off with alarming frequency. If they were not so piercing and deafening, students would not be so inclined to venture outside every time somebody burns their popcorn. At this point, those who do remain are convinced that the fire alarm means anything but actual fire.
The alarm system has also been spotty. Entire sections of the Village, for example, had alarms that made no sound until recently. Many students, myself and my roommate included, have inadvertently slept through early-morning fire alarms because the system failed to sound in a certain portion of the complex. Should there have been a real fire, this alarm failure could have been catastrophic.
In other buildings, while less frequent (perhaps due to a smaller concentration of kitchens), alarms are triggered with far too much frequency. Once somebody accidently walks into an emergency exit door in Usen Castle, for example, the entire hallway will be filled with cacaphonic trill until a police officer arrives to shut it off.
Last year, there was a period where the alarm in Massell’s Shapiro Hall would go off precisely at 1 a.m. on Friday mornings every week for three or four weeks without fail. While there was no way to be completely sure as to what caused the alarms, the distinct scent of cigarettes was always present, at times very close to the building. Shapiro Hall is not exclusive to this kind of mishap; campus rules on cigarettes are widely ignored, and the consequences of these violations have become more than worrisome.
When you walk along the side of the library, there are several signs attempting to push people smoking 30 feet away from the building. The library is especially vulnerable because it draws its air directly from physically accessible vents at the bottom of the building. Nevertheless, you can still see people smoking, at times, no more than five feet from those vents. Should that not set off the alarm, it most definitely will decrease the air quality in the buildings it enters.
The “30 feet rule” that the university employs is not by any means enforced anywhere on campus. People smoke 10 feet from, five feet from or sometimes right next to buildings. This situation is extremely problematic because it contributes to a sense that smoking near campus buildings is acceptable, leading to an increase in cigarette smoke-related alarm activations that everyone would have liked to avoid.
Like with simply moving a few feet further away from buildings, the other causes of the all too frequent activations of campus alarms can be avoided by the simple employment of common sense. For example, when you put something in the microwave, don’t leave it alone. Read the instructions on the food you’re heating up. If it says to add water, your choice is either to do that or to smoke up your kitchen.
This is the main problem: People are being careless with the utilities and freedoms given to them.
Some people like to cook for themselves, and that should be respected. However, at the same time people need to be responsible when they put something on the stove, in the oven or in the microwave. It is nonsensical to walk away from something that could so easily catch fire. When directions are given, read them and follow them; when there are explicit instructions on dryers to empty the lint trap, that needs to be done. If not, as many can attest to, the machine will smoke. At Brandeis, people are given the liberty to smoke with restrictions, so those that do should try to be respectful to those that do not and try to stay far enough away from buildings so as to not disturb others.
Common sense is a virtue when playing with fire, and its employment can help avoid scenarios where students do not want to venture outside during real fires thinking that it’s just another mishap.
