Catawba College’s tragedy is Salisbury’s tragedy. The death of a Catawba student in a dormitory fire calls for community action.
Two other college fires come to mind:Five young people died on Mother’s Day 1996 when fire destroyed a fraternity house at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Three students died and 62 were injured in 2000 when fire struck a Seton Hall dormitory.
Following the 1996 fire, The Chapel Hill Town Council passed a law requiring sprinkler systems in all fraternity and sorority houses and in all new buildings with more than 6,000 square feet of floor space. Outfitting the fraternity and sorority houses cost about $50,000 per building, a cost the houses shouldered on their own.
Even that aggressive ordinance hasn’t protected everyone. Just last Halloween, a UNC employee died in a fire in his apartment —an apartment that lacked a sprinkler system because it predated the town council’s ordinance.
But the Chapel Hill experience —and Catawba’s fatal fire Sunday, and another dorm fire at Livingstone College last spring —should prompt Salisbury City Council to look at its ordinances. State law does not mandate sprinkler systems in dormitories less than three stories tall. Salisbury might want to fill that gap, and require them on shorter dorms. What happens on college campuses may appear to be the colleges’ business —and certainly mandated sprinkler systems would put a financial burden on the schools —but the council must weigh the factors. Catawba administrators and trustees likely will do the same.
Sunday’s fatality should also prompt Catawba to review its smoke alarm system. The smoke alarms in Foil House had reportedly been disabled, perhaps because of two previous fires in the same vicinity that day. This could be more than bad practice; it could be criminal. An investigation is under way. If the college doesn’t have a policy outlining the upkeep and management of smoke alarms, it should.
Now, on to Seton Hall. That fire hit a dormitory that housed 800 students, but some similarities remain. The dorm had experienced several false alarms, so students tended to ignore the smoke alarms —a parallel to the two previous incidents Sunday at Foil House. And some students, when they were roused from deep sleep, were so confused by the smoke and heat that they crawled right into the blaze. The student who died Sunday, Stephen Andrew Grooms, reportedly also ran toward the fire instead of away.
Catawba College officials responded promptly and sensitively to the tragedy, and they no doubt will do their own investigation into how this tragedy could have been prevented. They must know that the community stands behind them and Stephen Andrew Grooms’ family —to investigate the cause of this blaze, to prevent similar tragedies, and to mourn the loss of a promising young life.
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