Sunday night, the residents of Arthur Hall were forced into the cold, and more importantly, to miss the Superbowl kickoff by an evening fire alarm. Many of the students who rushed out of the building and into the snow to escape the shrill alarm were barefoot and covered with only a towel or bathrobe. Arthur’s students quickly filled up the SGA lounge to escape the cold and watch the game on the big screen.
The second floor was filled with a thick, noxious-smelling smoke, which could almost immediately be smelled throughout the entire building. “The suite was so filled with smoke I couldn’t breathe when I went in there, and it burned my eyes,” said Public Safety Officer Jon Brooks.
So what was the cause of this evening evacuation? “A blackened, charred brick of rice,” said RA Jessie Madnick. The culprit seems to have been a bowl of rice thrown into the microwave for far too long, supposedly 28 minutes.