News
Fire safety on the Hill; learning from tragedy
By Katie Hee '14
October 4, 2012
The wooden dorm room set up in the quad outside the Taylor Science Center is furnished like a typical Hamilton single; two minutes after a fire is set in the corner, the chemicals in the air make the room deadly, in three, the smoke detector stops beeping and in four, the room appears to be a ball of fire.
In January of 2000 a similar scene was seared into the minds of the students, faculty and community members of Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey when a fire raged through Boland Hall, a freshman dorm, killing three students and injuring 58 others.
“That is the kind of huge tragedy that we’re trying to avoid by everything that we do here,” explained Director of Environmental Protection, Safety and Sustainability Brian Hansen.
The mock dorm room fire demonstration, in combination with a documentary about the Seton Hall tragedy, After the Fire: A Story of Heroes and Cowards and a presentation by two burn victims Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos represents an effort by Hamilton College to increase fire safety awareness.
“At 18, we weren’t prepared for fire safety.” Llanos described that when he and Simons left their dorm room the night of the fire they headed straight towards the flames. “As humans we fall into routine. We didn’t feel the doorknob for heat. We didn’t realize that two doors down from our room there was an exit.”
The fire, which began in the third floor common room, quickly spread throughout the dorm reaching temperatures of 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. After months of students pulling the fire alarms as pranks, students were hesitant to leave their beds for the cold January night. Two students were killed by the intense heat and a third from smoke inhalation.
Two sophomore boys started the Seton Hall fire around 4:30 a.m. as a prank after spending the night celebrating their basketball’s team surprising win. The perpetrators fled the scene and it took law enforcement over three years to identify and arrest them.
“We don’t have any malice towards them,” said Simons. “Their actions were not malicious.”
While neither Llanos nor Simons expressed anger at the arsonists, many of those interviewed in the documentary were unable to contain their disgust and resentment. The arsonists, Sean Ryan and Joseph LePore, accepted a plea and were sentenced to five years in prison but were eligible for parole 16 months later.
The documentary focused on the boys’ recovery. Llanos was burnt on over 60 percent of his body and had more than 30 surgeries over the five years after the fire. Simons was burnt on 16 percent of his body with 3rd degree burns on his hands from crawling on the carpet as it melted beneath him. They are now both married with children.
After finishing the documentary they turned to the audience, “You can ask us any questions,” said Simons. “We kind of do this as our therapy…so no other student has to go through what we did.”
Both Simons and Llanos acknowledged that the incident drew attention to a lack of fire safety standards. The dorm was lacking fire sprinklers and other fire hazards may have gone unnoticed. The tragedy caused New Jersey to be the first state to enact laws making sprinklers mandatory in college dorms; other states and colleges soon followed. This year marks the 10th anniversary that Hamilton has changed their fire safety procedure.
“We didn’t do full wall-to-wall inspections before,” said Hansen, explaining that the local code enforcer, who was previously responsible for fire safety, has a separate full time job. “We now check close to 40 percent of rooms.”
A photograph of the remnants of the third floor Boland Hall common room shows the burnt wooden frames of three couches and a board posted by the RA in the background. The couches are the same ones that are seen in Hamilton common rooms. Remembered Llanos, “we were 18 year old kids, I felt unstoppable.”