SMU Diary is an occasional first-person feature in which a reporter describes an interesting Hilltop experience.

Alarms screaming. Pitch black broken by blinding lights flashing. Smoke blurring. A faint reddish glow illuminates the stairwell. All signs of a fire, minus the heat. Students participating in the Great Escape faced these obstacles, trying to exit before “dying.”

Frustrating. Scary. Confusing. Sucked. Students described the experience after the exercise had ended. Fire department badge-shaped stickers covered most of their backs, showing the number of times they had been seriously hurt, burned or died.

I came out with five.

Residence life and student housing and the greek life group sponsored the second annual Great Escape to raise fire safety awareness among those living in greek houses and residence halls. The drill lasted five minutes. After five minutes, five students and I remained in the second story hallway of Lettermen Hall.

“A room can flash over in two minutes – the heat builds up to where everything in it can ignite,” University Park Fire Marshal Carl McMurphy said.

We died.

It had seemed so easy. I talked to SMU Fire Safety Coordinator Floyd Phelps before going in.

“When you talk about fire, people think different things – they associate it with things like grilling,” Phelps said. “You literally cannot see your hand in front of your face. You won’t believe what it’s like.”

He was right.

Phelps told me things none of the other participants knew. Hallway maps posted on the back of each door indicated the exits’ locations – there for all to see and utilize.

McMurphy practically said that the stairwell we went up would have the fire in it.

“Typically they try to go out the way they came in – that’s not always possible,” he said.

Despite all those hints, I still died.

Running amok

University Park firemen led students upstairs, put two in each vacant room and closed the door. Thick fog from smoke machines filled the halls. I laughed with my roommate as we watched smoke begin to seep through the door vent. Too bad we can’t totally duplicate a fire, minus the injuries, I said. We’re all alert. We know what’s going on and have already planned how to escape.

Hah!

The lights went out, the alarms on. We opened the door and entered the murky hallway. Shapes bumped through the passage. People scurried in different directions, heading toward the exits they’d seen upon entering. They groped blindly, touching passing bodies, walls and doors. Everything was in confusion.

Like a herd of bewildered sheep, we followed one another. First to the stairs we’d climbed minutes before. Those seemed blocked and smoky, so back we went the other way. The other stairwell glowed red, too. It looked like none of the shapes could go down the stairs. What was going on?

Through it all, UP firemen stood against the walls, watching the turmoil through thermal imaging cameras, showing body heat through smoke so they would know if somebody was in trouble. They said nothing, minus the occasional, “Are you OK?”

They put stickers on us, marking our burns, injuries and death.

Five stickers.

Correct procedure

After the firemen led the corpses from the building to the waiting survivors, the group discussed its feelings, thoughts and frustrations about the experience.

“That was shocking, we didn’t expect it at all,” junior Elizabeth Clemons said.

Some had tried to crawl at first but had given up after feet and knees kicked and knocked them. Others tried to avoid the crowd or at least break through it.

“Every time I started to go one way, there was a group of people,” sophomore business major Mike Jordhoy said.

McMurphy and the other firemen gave tips about what to do in a real fire.

Check for heat by feeling the door before opening it.

Get on your knees, then open the door.

Know where your exits are – all of them.

Crawl to the stairs and leave slowly.

Some tips they gave that I’d never heard before:

Count the number of doors from the stair to your room. That way, when the smoke blinds you, you can count until you reach the stairwell.

Stairwells have no carpet. Their tile floors can tell groping hands the exit is close.

Had it been a real fire, I wouldn’t have lived to write this.