A fire alarm left several ASU students out in the heat late Monday as the Tempe Fire Department scoured a campus high-rise searching for the cause of the alarm.
At about 6:45 pm, fire alarms rang out in the BAC Building of the W.P Carey School of Business at ASU. Students evacuated the building immediately and Tempe Firemen were on the scene within 15 minutes.
The cause of the alarm stemmed from a fuse box inside the building, said Captain Gibby Gorman of the Tempe Fire Department.
"The engine company got up to the fourth floor, first, where the emergency was supposed to be and they located an industrial sized fuse box that had either over heated or shorted out causing a little bit of smoke," Gorman said.
"Basically all we did was cut the power at the fusible link, a fuse there, and it isolated it to that area," Gorman said. "We confirmed that with a thermal imaging camera that we have which shows us heat in specific areas."
Gorman said once the problem was isolated, there was no other emergency.
Approximately 150 students crowded the amphitheater outside the building for 45 minutes while a search was conducted throughout the high rise.
"We were in class, we were just doing normal lecture and all of a sudden we heard a fire alarm and we thought it was a drill," said Sam Dembow, a Business and Communications junior.
"Basically, [we] thought it was a routine," Dembow said. "[We] went down, exited the building and saw a bunch of fire trucks pull up."
David Hoffman, a lecturer at ASU was conducting his Finance class at the time of the first sounds of the alarm.
"This is more fire people than I have ever seen in my 15 years here at ASU," Hoffman said.
Despite the uncertainty amidst all the chaos, students seemed to be in good demeanor as they took a lengthy break from their classes.
"Everyone was calm," Hoffman said. "We wondered if it was real, we just said get your stuff and go outside. Everyone was orderly."
Though the alarm turned out to be a non-emergency the Tempe Fire Department had 12 units brought to the scene.
"On this type of incident with the amount of life safety issues we have, if there was an incident with smoke and fire it could have escalated to a point where we needed a lot more resources for problems evacuating people from the structure," Gorman said.
Tempe Fire officials said the incident has been turned over to ASU facilities who will determine what caused the fuse box to over heat and how to fix it.
