I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of birds chirping. It was really loud, so once I really woke up I eventually realized that it was the fire alarm. After getting dressed, I ran out through the fog in the halls. I knew it wasn't smoke, I've evacuated from a burning building before, but nevertheless, I went outside to find the goal-posts like they told us to at the beginning of the year.

When I got outside, less than half of the students that live in D-block were mingling right next to the exit and no Resident Associates (RAs) or Floor Representatives were present. (Um... if this was a real fire shouldn't we be farther away from the building?) After approximately 20 minutes of people complaining about having just gone to bed, somebody took control and made everyone move out to the goalposts. Please note this was after the firemen got to D-block. There was no one in charge to address the firemen when they arrived and to collaborate with them to keep everyone safe because most of the RAs as well as the College Masters were not in range of the alarms.

Why did the alarm only go off in D-Block? I'm quite sure a fire would endanger the whole building. Eventually the firemen came out with an empty fire extinguisher from the stairwell of D-block. The D-block RA finally made an appearance and made the firemen tell her what was going on. I had not noticed her presence before this, but to be fair, the area we were in prior to that moment was pitch black due to the complete lack of lights at the goal-posts.

The firemen reported that the top of the extinguisher had been damaged, causing it to empty into the halls in an impressively small amount of time. That explained the absence of smoke and the nasty slippery mess we ran through to get out, as well as the caustic chemical smell. So there was no real fire, but there was no oxygen to breathe either. Hooray!

Even after the RA found out what was going on, there was confusion about who could go back in and who could not. In the end, it was my floor that was the worst hit. So, the rest of my floor and I were stuck in the servery for a while until the building was aired out.

The basic point is that none of the fire-alarm infrastructure worked during this incident on top of other issues: people did not evacuate on time; people did not congregate at the designated areas; no one was able to take charge of the situation; only the alarm at D-Block went off although the fire should have potentially endangered the other blocks and the information exchanged between the firemen and the students was not clear.

Maybe I over exaggerate the importance of following fire-safety procedures because last year I lived in a building that had a five minute burn time. This means it was estimated that the entire building would be in flames in five minutes once a fire took hold. Despite this bias, I firmly believe that a real fire would have devastated the College III population.

Recently, Götz Pfander, the College Master of College III, sent out an email to the college list stating that the costs of incurring the fire alarm added up to €400. The email also confirmed rumors that the alarm was indeed caused by a prank, and stated the guilty party is still unknown.