Letter to the Editor

To any Duke student, the Oct. 8th article about excessive fire alarm activations seemed incredibly predictable because it has happened to everyone at least once. But that is exactly why it was both appropriate and important to print on the front page: because it brings attention to a real on-campus condition that people need to think more about.

Usually, when I am standing outside at three in the morning (unless I’ve seized the opportunity to run off to Pitchfork for a midnight snack), I think about what would happen if there ever were a truly life-threatening fire. I’ve seen fire trucks unable to respond to alarms because they couldn’t enter the Green Zone without a parking pass or were blocked from the Chapel circle by tents for alumni events. There’s also no protocol for making sure that everyone in the building has gotten out. The people most likely to ignore alarms, who may be drunk, especially heavy sleepers or both, are most at risk because they wouldn’t notice a fire until it was too late. Even an automated text message to all residents that attempted to collect information on who was not there at the time could be an improvement.

To prevent all the false activations, there’s got to be some way of knowing who is setting them off, which is obviously not an easy task. I understand why the University wouldn’t give statistics on false activations on East; a he-said, she-said account of who is at fault won’t solve the problem. But I would have liked to hear more about whether Duke is considering much-needed changes to its fire alarm protocol. Sadly, given Duke’s poor current policies, an article about an actual fire would be pretty predictable as well.

Lauren Forman

T ‘16