News Reporter
At the end of the school day on Thursday, April 27th, as Choate students prepared to leave for a restful long weekend, community members were alarmed to see North Elm Street suddenly fill up with fire trucks. Community Safety had received a call from a student at 12:30 PM about an odd smell near Room 203 in Edsall. All students were evacuated for several hours after the call, but it ended up being nothing more than a false alarm.
The Wallingford Fire Department responded instantly when Community Safety called for them, and they checked the whole building, but did not find anything. The smell was still pervasive in the dorm after the full checkup by the Fire Department, but no source or cause was readily apparent.
The Fire Marshal and Gerard McCormick, the Director of Community Safety at Choate, both agreed if all of their gadgets and tools were correct, that the only other possibility was that a student had spilled or misused some material that he or she did not want to tell anyone about. The Fire Department searched the dorm for over two hours. Mr. McCormick said, “Once every other possibility has been eliminated, omitted information like a student spilling some chemical becomes the common denominator. That was most likely the situation.”
After the officials deemed it safe for the students to return and finish packing up for long weekend, Mr. McCormick was still wary of the burning smell in the dorm, so he arranged a check-up every thirty minutes. He was pleased with the efficiency and with the overall reaction of his team.
Since all the girls would be leaving the dorm that night, there was also no risk of any of them getting injured, incase whatever it was that was causing the burning smell resparked later on.
“This emergency was a good test to see how prepared our team was for any situation. I was pleased to see that everything was executed without a hitch. The Fire Department came and took care of blocking off the road and brought more sophisticated tools for the search. Community Safety and the fire department coordinated cleanly to make this a pain-free task.”
The timing of the emergency also proved to be fortuitous since everyone was already preparing to leave the dorm for long weekend.
The alarm was not related to the construction that had been going on behind Edsall all morning.
