Brooks Hall, Brooks Dining Hall and Walker Hall were evacuated shortly before 8 p.m. on Sunday, April 12, after a burning smell in the Brooks dining room prompted Parkhurst employees to contact the Office of Public Safety, who then made the decision to call 911.
Vice President for Enrollment Management Jennifer Winge, ’96, was eating dinner in Brooks at the time of the emergency.
“A number of the Parkhurst staff members and myself, we all started to smell an unusual odor in the main dining hall,” Winge said. “They started to investigate and immediately called Public Safety. So within minutes, our Public Safety officers were in the space.”
Corporal Ken Saulsbery, a supervisor in the Office of Public Safety, responded to the call.
“When I came down, it was significant enough that it smelled like wires burning,” Saulsbery told The Campus. “That’s why I had the fire department dispatched because they have equipment that we don’t that they can see if there’s a fire.”
PulsePoint, a 911-integrated app that alerts users to nearby emergencies, documented that the Crawford County Department of Public Safety received a call at 7:43 p.m. reporting a structure fire at Brooks Hall.
Four fire trucks, several ambulances and dozens of first responders responded, with the majority of them congregating on Park Avenue, shutting down the road between Schultz Hall and West John Street. Several firefighters entered the front of the building facing Bentley Hall, with several more climbing an aerial ladder up to the roof of the dining hall in the back.
A firefighter at the scene told The Campus that there was smoke on the roof, but not a fire.
Saulsbery said the first responders identified the problem as a rooftop HVAC system motor that had malfunctioned, “seized up” and died.
“It wasn’t a fire,” Saulsbery said. “Just one of the motors, when it blew up, that smell of wire burning was actually coming down into a vent, so that’s where that smoke smell, wire smell was in Brooks dining.”
Physical Plant employees also responded to the call and were able to confirm that the HVAC motor had broken and was emitting the smell, Saulsbery added. First responders used thermal imagery technology to verify that the odor was only coming from the burned out motor.
“They checked to make sure there was no type of fire,” Saulsbery continued, “so everything is clear.”
Parkhurst employees and evacuated students re-entered the buildings at 8:11 p.m. The first responders reopened Park Avenue to car traffic and departed shortly after 8:15 p.m.
PulsePoint marked the call as closed at 8:33 p.m., 50 minutes after it was received.
The Brooks head resident advisor sent a message to the building group chat at 8:58 p.m. that she said was passed directly along from Dean for Student Life Trae Yeckley. The message stated that “there is no ongoing danger in the building. The cause for the concern was identified and shut down, and the fire department was there out of an abundance of caution.”
