TO THE EDITOR:
After we had our third pulled fire alarm this year in the Craige Residence Hall on South Campus a week ago, I can’t help but laugh at the thought of giving more importance to fire drills.
The editorial board for the article “a second for safety” explains that preparation for emergencies by imposing quarterly fire drills would increase the attention to safety, rather than causing smugness in the wake of danger, but fails to evaluate the practicality of this idea.
Obligatory safety procedures that the University mandates that students follow like the Alcohol Awareness tests and fire drills remain overlooked and skimmed through by students. With classes, homework, volunteering and other extracurriculars filling up the busy schedule of a college student, distant threats and probable yet hypothetical situations fall to last priority.
Students go through the motions to complete the required tasks in the easiest and quickest ways that detract least from more immediate duties, so increasing the number of prerequisite preparations would not solve the complacency problem.
If anything, requiring more fire drills will aggravate students to the extent that they’d disregard drills entirely. Having experienced three false fire alarms already this year, I am far less inclined to spring out of bed, and quickly and calmly evacuate my dorm because I’m trained to think that it’s just another drill or false alarm.
To prepare for emergencies, the first matter of business is not to increase the number of practices, but rather to decrease the number of false alarms by implementing punitive measures on perpetrators, and planning out one dorm-wide drill far in advance, so that students know how to react to danger without disregarding it as false or a waste of time.
David Lindars ’17 Undecided
