Fire Breaks Out In Barnard Quad, Hundreds Evacuate

Upper West Side NY

20 October, 2021

1:27 PM

Description

Columbia Daily Spectator BY DIA GILL, IRIE SENTNER, AND SOPHIE DAU OCTOBER 19, 2021 A mattress fire broke out on the sixth floor of Brooks Hall after 9 p.m. on Monday, causing hundreds of Barnard students to evacuate their dorms onto Claremont Avenue and Broadway and across Barnard's campus. No injuries were reported, and the structural damage remains unclear. A Barnard Community Accountability, Response, and Emergency Services notification went out at 9:40 p.m. instructing students to "maintain distance from all points to the quad." Students in the area were encouraged to gather in the Diana Center, in the Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning, and under the tents on Futter Field. Twenty New York Fire Department units responded with about 78 firefighters. The fire was "placed under control" at 9:53 p.m., according to the FDNY. The burning mattress was thrown outside of the student's room, breaking their window and landing on the porch roof of Brooks Hall. "We don't have a lot of information, so give us a little bit of time. Everything seems to be under control," Barnard President Sian Beilock told Spectator after reaching campus tonight. Photo by Rommel Nunez / Senior Staff PhotographerFiremen and other officials entering the Quad with equipment. According to an email sent by Leslie Grinage, the dean of Barnard College, the fire "was started unintentionally and spread across two rooms on the sixth floor of Brooks Hall." All students residing in the Quad's four buildings were forced to evacuate from Reid Hall, Sulzberger, Brooks Hall, and Hewitt Hall, as well as Sulzberger Tower, which is connected to the four buildings. Multiple students reported that a fire alarm had not gone off in Sulzberger Tower. Lily Kuhn, BC '25, experienced difficulty evacuating efficiently, reporting that there was general confusion about what to do. "It was so slow getting out of the building," Kuhn said. "There was a girl next to us who was working on a test, she was working on it on her laptop as we were evacuating the building and it was pretty stressful. We got out and all the people—I'm not sure if they were RAs or firefighters—but they looked at students and they were just yelling at us and saying, 'Go that way, go that way.'" Valencia Hopkins, BC '25, was in the shower and did not initially hear the alarms when they first went off. When she realized it was not a fire drill, she quickly dressed and ran to her room, which she said had become "warm." "I could feel the heat in there, so I ran as fast as I could, and I was probably one of the last ones out of the building," Hopkins said. "I smelled some kind of smoke or gas or something." Dean Grinage sent out an email to the Barnard community at 12:35 a.m. on Tuesday explaining the circumstances of the fire. Evacuated students were instructed to return to their rooms shortly after, with impacted students being "reassigned to other rooms on campus." Grinage's email thanked a "quick and thorough response of Barnard staff members" in addition to "the support provided by the FDNY and the New York Police Department" and the Barnard community for its "patience and cooperation this evening." News Editor Dia Gill can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @_diagill. Deputy News Editor Irie Sentner can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @iriesentner. Staff writer Sophie Dau can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow Spectator on Twitter @ColumbiaSpec. Founded in 1877, the Columbia Daily Spectator is the independent undergraduate newspaper of Columbia University, serving thousands of readers in Morningside Heights, West Harlem, and beyond. Read more at columbiaspectator.com and donate here.