J-Rowl Ablaze, Engine 2 Comes to the Rescue
Editors Note: The following news update was sent in to us by Mike Pinkowish.
Engine 2 is like these guys, but real people. (And their truck doesn't say 88 on it.)
As reported in the Times Union and Troy Record (though I first learned of it through Facebook), the Jonsson-Rowland Science Center caught fire after an experiment went terribly wrong. All we know so far is that an unnamed female student, working alone, started the fire in a third floor lab in J-Rowl.
The fire was so bad, in fact, that 10 companies responded to the fire and 15 firefighters were sent to Samaritan for treatment.
Chemical fires can be very nasty in that dousing them with water may exacerbate the problem. This evening’s blaze reportedly spewed ‘thick black smoke’, but fortunately the lady in the lab was able to escape with only minor burns on her hands.
Of course, the incident again raises the issue of whether RPI should be paying extra money for public safety. The institute has over 250 labs, filled with huge variety of chemicals, on the Troy campus. Any one of them could be the source of the next fire on campus, and possibly be as devastating as the one which took down Walker Lab many years ago. If nothing else, if Engine 2 (located across the street from campus) hadn’t been able to respond as quickly as they did, its quite possible J-Rowl would’ve suffered much more damage than it did.
Regardless, the RPI community owes Engine 2 a big thank you, not just for their responsiveness today, but also for their continued service and having the patience to deal with our weekly popcorn fires. Once we learn how to cook popcorn, we might get the hang of this whole chemistry thing…
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The firefighters were only sent to the hospital because they’re hoping that RPI would have to admit that their firefighters were exposed to harm above and beyond what their admittedly risk-filled position already entails. Troy overreacts to everything on RPI’s campus because they’re just looking for more money from us. While I can admit that RPI’s tax-exempt status within Troy means that the city is missing out on a metric ton of financial assistance, this showboating on the part of the city’s public safety leadership is uncalled for and thoroughly unprofessional.
I refer to a comment posted on an article in the Troy Record with response to the time it took for RPI Public Safety to relay the call to Troy FD. Troy was reporting that 12 minutes went by before RPI decided to contact the fire department. RPI said 32 seconds. The first response, coming clearly from somebody with inside knowledge and something to gain from RPI financial concessions, was simply this:
“They’re lying. The dispatch officer at Public Safety must write down in his log each call that comes in. If a motivated Record reporter were to go down to the Public Safety Office and ask to see the original log from that night, i’m sure they would find a discrpency in the actual time the call was made and this “new” information that RPI released today.”
(http://www.troyrecord.com/articles/2009/07/02/news/doc4a4c270441b2d156516853.txt)
I’m not here to argue that firefighters and other emergency service personnel deserve scorn for their work — some of my closest friends and relatives are EMTs and firefighters. Rather, I believe Troy should be ashamed at taking advantage of its emergency service personnel to better its financial standing. So I will thank the firefighters of Engine 2 for their service — but not Troy.