Students living in Shuttles Hall were evacuated early Tuesday morning after three separate fires broke out on the first and fourth floors of the residence hall.
Fire alarms woke sleeping students at 5:30 a.m. As they filed out of the hall, students were moved to the lobby of nearby Peyton Hall. They were held at Peyton for almost two hours while the University Park Fire Department searched the building.
“You could see smoke in the hallways when we were leaving,” first-year Megan Bettis said.
At press time, representatives from the SMU Police Department, the University Park Fire Department and SMU’s Resident Life and Student Housing were unavailable for comment.
According to several residents, two fires on the fourth floor were ignited with papers taped to two doors in the hallway. One the wall, next to one of the fires, explicatives were scrawled in blue marker.
The fire on the first floor was set outside one of the dorm rooms, junior Shannon Schmidt said, who was sitting in the front lobby with friends when the alarms went off. She noted that she did not see anyone enter or leave the building while she was there.
“Nobody came in. Nobody came out. It was like a ghost,” Schmidt said.
As firemen entered the building to extinguish the fire, they found a number of students still sleeping in their rooms, despite the ringing alarms.
“The alarms aren’t loud enough out in these halls. It sounded like someone’s alarm clock,” first-year Brittany Timmerman said. “If I hadn’t been awake already, I’m sure I would have slept through it.”
Unlike other residence halls on campus, there is not a fire alarm in every room in Shuttles. Two alarms placed at central points in the hallway serve the entire fourth floor.
“I just didn’t wake up until the fire department knocked on my door,” Samara Mele said. Mele, a first-year, was the last student evacuated from the building.