Campus Fire Safety Month Spurs Prevention Efforts

The rebuilt ATO house on the Ole Miss campus. Three students died when it caught fire in 2004. The new house has high-tech smoke detectors and sprinkler systems.

September is Campus Fire Safety Month. While officials are promoting fire safety at all schools, the target audience is college students. MPB’s Cari Gervin has more.

House mother Sunny Lord points to a picture hanging on the wall of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at the University of Mississippi.

“He went back in, which is something you don’t want to do. You want to listen to what the firemen tell you it’s don’t go back in the house. But he went back in after his brothers and succumbed to the smoke.”

The fraternity brother Lord is talking about is William Townsend. He was one of three Ole Miss students who died five years ago when the ATO house caught on fire.

And it’s tragic deaths like these that State Fire Marshal Mike Chaney is hoping to prevent. His office is spearheading a new campaign to teach fire safety on all school campuses. But he’s making a special effort to reach out to college students.

“What we’re doing on college campuses is going in and training dorm dads, and we’re training the people that live in the dormitory, and we’re training the campus personnel as to how to prevent fires, where to install smoke alarms, where to have the fire-fighting equipment in a dormitory so you don’t have the fire deaths.”

Since the 2004 fire, Ole Miss has worked with the campus Greek system to improve fire safety measures in frat houses, as well as beefing up sprinkler systems in the dorms.

But the Mississippi Insurance Department says 80 percent of all student-related fires happen in off-campus housing, which is why increasing student awareness is so important.

Dean of Students Thomas Reardon:

“You know we try to get our students to do that, but it’s so difficult, because they live so many places around town.”

In the past five years, there have been three on-campus and three off-campus fire-related student deaths at Mississippi universities.

For MPB News, I’m Cari Gervin in Oxford.