Residents of Echols were forced to evacuate their residence hall at 2:57 a.m. yesterday morning after a fire alarm sounded. They were permitted to return to their rooms around 3:40 a.m., although residents said they were allowed into the Chemistry Building lobby after about 10 minutes in the cold.
Fire Department and University Police officials said they have no estimate on the number of dorm evacuations each year. But students say the incidents occur more often than they'd like and at inconvenient times, like 2:57 a.m.
"I was definitely asleep when it happened, and I still had to get up for class even though I had lost a lot of sleep," said first-year College student Mary Anna Gilmer, one of the evacuees.
The vast majority of evacuations are false alarms or minor problems. At Echols yesterday morning, a student smelled burning plastic and alerted the fire department.
"A light ballast, the inside of a fluorescent light bulb, failed and began to smoke and emit a faint odor," said Charlottesville Fire Department Captain Pete Sweeney.
The bulb that caused the alarm was removed and no one was injured, Sweeney said.
Students in some first-year dorms said they deal with several alarms each year.
"There have been quite a few alarms this year," said Echols resident Josh Green, a first-year Engineering student. "I don't know the exact number, but this is about the fifth."
Alarms plague some dorms more than others. Balz resident Eric Reilly, a first-year College student, said there has only been one fire alarm in his residence hall this year.
However, former Echols residents Liz Lodge and Christina Mannino, both second-year College students, said there were at least six night alarms in Echols last year, causing much inconvenience.
"I was in my bathrobe once, the ugly one, and had to evacuate, and it was freezing," Mannino said.
Most of these alarms are caused by detector malfunction or human error, according to Sweeney.
Irate students tend to blame the latter. Rebecca Armstrong, a fourth-year College student, claimed most of the alarms in Brown College the year she lived there were caused by food left in the dorm ovens. And according to Mannino, "People in Echols just don't know how to make popcorn."
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