Stuyvesant Evacuations Raise Safety Protocol Concerns

A few minutes into first period on Thursday, October 17, the fire alarm went off and students were promptly asked to evacuate the building, the cause ostensibly being a small fire and smoke issue in the elevator machine room. Only two periods later, administration asked that students evacuate once more in response to student complaints of a gas-like smell on various floors.

When the first alarm rang, students and teachers alike were unsure as to whether it was real. “We all thought it was just a mistake [because] the teacher didn’t know about it,” sophomore Shriya Anand said in an e-mail interview. “One of the kids said that someone probably pulled it [because] he didn’t want to take a math test, so we just stayed in the classroom, which I know is not the safest decision but I guess it’s because there have been so many accidental fire alarms that we didn’t really think it was a big deal.”

Following the first evacuation, students and staff waited outside the school building while Principal Eric Contreras called the local fire department to perform a thorough investigation of the issue. Every floor was checked, and gas readings returned negligible results, allowing all Stuyvesant students and staff to resume their daily routines.

Meanwhile, students outside were elated to see the trucks arrive. “When the first fire truck came, everyone started clapping—not [because] the school was about to be saved, but because everyone thought that the problem was serious enough for a fire truck to come—which meant there was a possibility that we could go home,” Anand said. “When the other three—I think it was three—trucks came in, everyone cheered even more.”

The second evacuation was conducted as a precautionary measure after students reported gas-like odors from different areas of the building. “The smell was much stronger, and I thought [it] was crazy that they chose to keep us in the building with that gas smell until then. Like I remember saying that, ‘this has to be a joke,’” Anand said.

The Fire Department of New York was brought in once more, and readings returned a negligible gas level again. The administration performed other gas readings to ensure that the building was safe before allowing people to re-enter. “Contreras and [Assistant Principal of Security, Health, and Physical Education Brian] Moran also asked ConEd to come to the building, and they went specifically to each area of reported odor as well as every floor and also came back with no elevated readings,” Director of Family Engagement Dina Ingram said in an e-mail interview. “Our custodians, who do readings of all three meters at Stuyvesant daily, repeated their scans and found no significant variation differences between the readings from that day to other days of the week.”

The school experienced no damage, and the rest of the day followed a regular schedule, despite many students arriving late to second and fourth periods as a result of the two evacuations. Contreras later attributed the gas smells that prompted the second evacuation to concurrent winds that blew the scent from chemistry labs on the ninth floor.

Though both evacuations were handled swiftly by the administration, they raised concerns regarding the efficiency of student and teacher response to alarms. “The number of fire drills and false alarms we've had since the beginning of this year [...] has desensitized students and teachers to the fire alarm,” Student Union Vice President Julian Giordano said. “It's become normal for teachers to wait for two to three minutes after the alarm starts ringing before evacuating their students from the classroom. Many classes wait for an announcement over the PA system before beginning to evacuate.”

Giordano also brought up issues regarding evacuation time and efficiency. “The two evacuations last week showed how it takes many students on the upper floors over five minutes to exit the building because of how congested the stairwells can be,” Giordano said. “The school needs to make a concerted effort at improving the safety and efficiency of evacuations, be that through changing the evacuation protocol, emphasizing the seriousness of evacuations to students and faculty, [or], if necessary, upgrading the current fire panel and alarm system.”

The administration has recognized such underlying problems and has already planned changes to the school’s fire panels. “Contreras hopes to have the fire panel replaced along with the PA system by requests for capital funding in the future, as they are original to the school building,” Ingram said.

At a recent School Leadership Team meeting, Contreras reminded faculty of evacuation protocol to immediately evacuate classrooms instead of waiting for confirmation. He explained that the basis of this protocol was to make sure that shooters could not pull a fire alarm to bring students out into the halls and expressed the possibility of reconsidering this policy to ensure that student safety is always the first priority. “The protocol as it stands now is not to wait for confirmation or any announcement, which is normal. When a fire alarm rings, everyone should begin evacuation,” Ingram said. “If there is reason to call off the evacuation or a false alarm, someone will come on the PA and make an announcement.”

While the evacuations ran smoothly and did not put the safety of any students or staff at risk, they brought up issues regarding student and teacher protocol as well as faulty alarm systems that have affected faculty responses to real evacuations. Through their reforms to the alarm system and enforcement of the current protocol, the administration is hoping to produce more efficient responses from members of the building during emergencies, making Stuyvesant a safer place in the process.