Students Apathetic Toward Fire Codes
By Elana Glowatz Cooking-related fires, which according to a Stony Brook University safety and security reading account for more than 90 percent of fire alarms, are often caused by the use of prohibited appliances in campus dorm rooms. But privacy rules prevent resident assistants from searching for an occupant’s hidden cooking equipment. Students are warned about health and safety inspections anywhere from 24 to 48 hours beforehand, giving them ample time to cover appliances such as microwaves and grills with a sheet, or to throw their cooking equipment underneath their beds. "RAs can’t see things under blankets," joked a technology-systems management major who has two microwaves and a George Foreman grill in his suite. "They go completely blind." Resident assistants are responsible for conducting health and safety inspections, and if they suspect a student is hiding an appliance, they "can ask them to uncover it," said Amy Wallin, a senior who was an RA last year in Baruch College in Kelly Quad. But the student can decline to do so. Under normal circumstances, Campus Residences cannot enter a student’s room without prior notice or touch a student’s belongings without permission. "It’s about privacy versus the law," said Baycan Fideli, associate director of student affairs and campus residences at Stony Brook. "Cooking is a necessary evil." Rahat Ahmed, an RA in Toscanini College in Tabler Quad, described walking into a room for an inspection and discovering a sheet draped over something rectangular that had an electrical cord coming out of it. He asked what it was, and the women in the room replied, "Jewelry." "I asked to see it, and they wouldn’t let me," Ahmed said. "I asked them what the cord was for and they were, like, 'It keeps it refurbished,' whatever that means. I know it was a microwave!" Microwaves are not allowed in campus dorms because the buildings are relatively old. "One student can plug in a microwave," said Fideli. But "there are 9,000 student residents," he added, and the quads "were not built to supply a huge amount of power." Because students often decline to uncover whatever is hidden, RAs find it difficult to regulate illegal cooking in bedrooms. "We go like this every night when we go to sleep," Fideli said, crossing his fingers on both hands. With 9,000 residents, "it only takes 1 percent" to ignore the law. If an inspecting RA suspects that the resident is violating the fire code, the RA "can come back within 48 hours to try to catch them," Ahmed said. But this often does not work, and as a result, those who use the prohibited cooking appliances put the lives of many students in danger. According to a 2001 U.S. Fire Administration’s report on dormitory fires, 39 percent of those injured during dormitory fires were not in the room where the fire originated. And more than half of those victims were not even on the same floor as the point of origin. But some think that the fault does not lie with students who are trying to pull a fast one but rather with apathetic RAs. "RAs don’t care," said one health-sciences major. "One of my friends in Ammann freshman year was living with an RA, and he had a microwave. [The RA] called it a 'time machine.'" "They ignore things," she added, laughing. During a recent health and safety inspection, two RAs walked into the room of an economics major and spotted several fire code violations. Decorations hung from the ceiling, electrical wires ran across the middle of the room and a grill sat on a windowsill partially concealed by the curtains. One RA pointed out the decorations and the wires. "You can’t have these here," she said, pointing to the ceiling. "If there’s a fire, they can burn someone running out of the room." She pointed to the wires on the floor and said, "And these can trip someone. You need to have them against the wall." When the student protested, the RA said, "If I see you taking these down now, I don’t have to write it up. As long as I see you moving to fix it." The economics student didn’t get any write-ups and was able to put back up the few removed decorations as soon as the RAs left the room. But the RAs are not the only ones who seem apathetic. People ages 18 to 24 are at the highest risk during a fire because "they are not thinking about safety," said Fideli. "Until they are the victim." Although he added that the school is spending $5.2 million to update the fire alarm systems, the report by the U.S. Fire Administration stated that students often ignore fire alarms "because of frequent false alarms in the dorm." "I’ve slept in on a lot of drills," said one psychology major. "It’s almost never a real fire." |
