Local universities worry
about keeping students safe

First responders and school officials call dorm fire their greatest fear

By Jacob Geiger

Robert Foresman's nightmare is a dormitory fire.  It could come true any late Friday or Saturday night at Washington and Lee University.

"You would have students that are asleep, possibly had been drinking, and their responsiveness would be really low," he said.
    
The four-story, century-old Graham-Lees dorm houses about 250 students in a maze of twisting hallways and dead ends.  It's hard enough for students to find their way through the building under normal conditions; during a fire, escape would be even more difficult for students. Firefighters trying to coordinate an evacuation in an unfamiliar building would be stymied and rescuers would have trouble getting stretchers up narrow stairways.

Foresman is paid to worry about such things: he is Rockbridge County's emergency management coordinator and the former chief of Lexington's volunteer fire department.

Worse, if a catastrophic fire broke out at any of the three Rockbridge area universities, local first responders would have to rely on backup from other fire and rescue departments in the area.  Most of those departments have no idea of the universities’ emergency plans.

Local fire departments rarely -- if ever -- conduct drills at Washington and Lee, Virginia Military Institute or Southern Virginia University, which, like W&L, have multi-story living spaces for students.

"We haven't actually come over and done [a drill]," Lexington Fire Chief David Clark acknowledges.  "That's something that if W&L was interested in we could do."

Kerrs Creek Fire Chief Dennis Goodbar says his department is the "second due" for a fire at W&L. That means they would be the second company -- after the Lexington department -- expected to be on the scene. He said the department doesn't have floor plans of the W&L dorms on hand.

"We did come walk through a few years ago," Goodbar said.

W&L Dean of Students Dawn Watkins keeps a floor plan of each dormitory in her office and her home.  If a fire broke out she would share them with Lexington Police and firefighters.  The university has also been working to make sure all on-campus housing has sprinkler systems.  The dormitories, fraternity and sorority houses have the systems, leaving only a few "theme-houses," such as the Spanish House, on Lee Avenue without the additional protection.

Instead of live drills, Watkins said, W&L officials meet with local emergency management staffs for "tabletop" planning sessions.  In March the scenario was a campus shooting; in June they will plan for a "facility failure," which could mean a fire, flood or other damage that leaves a building unusable.

Clark said the Lexington Fire Department is trying to buy a computer system for its trucks that would store plans of buildings throughout the city.  When the department responded to a fire, firefighters could pull up the floor plans and start reviewing them before they even arrived at the site.

"At the touch of a button it would give you everything you wanted to know," Clark said.  "Floor plans, stairwells, fire hydrants [and] sprinkler systems."

But the computer system will cost between $30,000 and $40,000, and the department doesn't have that much money available.

"We're looking at asking the schools and some of the retailers in town to help us out with the cost," Clark said.

How the universities prepare

At SVU, Director of Public Safety Hugh Bouchelle said the most likely emergency to happen on his campus is a dorm fire. 

"We have provisions for housing students in other dormitories if there's a fire," said Bouchelle, a former search and rescue coordinator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "But if our main building got on fire we would probably have to close the school until we could repair it."

SVU's main dormitory is a wood-framed building, leaving it susceptible to fire.

The Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house at W&L burned down in the spring of 1984 in a suspected arson.  Most students were on spring break, but the fraternity president died of smoke inhalation while trying to escape the house. 

More than just fires

Dormitory fires are just one kind of crisis W&L Dean of Students Watkins is expected to plan for.

"We have to be vigilant," Watkins said. "The number one thing is prevention."

Watkins and her counterparts at VMI and Southern Virginia keep what are commonly known as "all-hazard" plans.  They detail how the campus would respond to problems ranging from a small power outage to a mass shooting like the April 2007 tragedy at Virginia Tech.

In the past few years, for example, concerns about a possible avian influenza outbreak have led each school to develop quarantine and evacuation plans.

In a disaster at VMI, Col. Jim Joyner said, the school would make use of the approximately 40 students who are trained Emergency Medical Technicians.  He also said the VMI hospital has agreed to treat faculty, staff and their families during an outbreak to reduce the strain on the local health department and Carilion Stonewall Jackson Hospital.
  
Because Dr. David Copeland and Dr. Jane Horton work at both W&L and VMI, Watkins said the two universities are prepared to support each other during a disease outbreak.  If a large number of students became infected, Watkins said, W&L would turn Gilliam Dormitory -- which has the health center located in its basement -- into an infirmary.

One of the problems with pandemic flu is that a widespread outbreak could make it difficult for students to travel home.  Bouchelle said that because many SVU students live out of state, the school has kits with food, water and germ masks that students could use while they travel home.

Could Virginia Tech happen here?

Emergency planners at all three schools say that the small size of their institutions would make it more difficult for a student like Seung-Hui Cho -- the Virginia Tech shooter -- to go unnoticed.  The Virginia Tech Review Panel, a group of experts appointed by Gov. Tim Kaine to review all of the information and events surrounding the shootings in April 2007, noted that Cho was recommended for counseling several times but never attended an appointment.
 
Watkins said W&L has four counselors working with 2,200 students, or roughly one per 500 students, while Virginia Tech has 12 counselors for more than 28,000 students, or one for about every 2,300 students. 

Bouchelle also said SVU's small size works in its favor.

"We have an advantage as a small school because everyone knows each other, and it's difficult to disappear if you're having problems," Bouchelle said.

Bouchelle said SVU rewrote parts of its emergency plan after the Tech shootings, adding a "Code Red" operation that can shut down campus if someone opens fire.
 
Both SVU and W&L have instituted e2campus text message systems.  Students can sign up for the program, and in an emergency a text message will be sent to their phone telling them what is happening and what they should do.

Bouchelle said he's discovered one flaw with the program.

"Several colleges have had incidents and found that students didn't know what to do when they got the text messages," he said. 

To fix the problem, Bouchelle hopes to teach some emergency preparedness during freshman orientation and also teach SVU's residential advisors what to do during a shooting.

"If we train [Resident Assistants] and the faculty or staff, then at least someone in every classroom will know what to do," he said.

Practicing for the worst

On an early spring day, members of the Virginia State Police SWAT team burst into the VMI barracks, running past bleeding victims as they looked for a shooter.

The blood was fake.  There was no shooter, and all students were safely home on spring break.

But the drill -- which was organized by VMI and involved members of local and regional police, fire and rescue departments -- let some of the area's first responders see what a real shooting might look like.
 
As the SWAT team cleared the barracks, members of the Lexington Lifesaving Crew tagged victims with ID cards.  If the card was green, the patient had minor injuries.  Yellow meant more severe wounds, while red meant a patient needed immediate treatment and transportation to a hospital.  A black tag meant the victim was already dead. 

With so many agencies involved, Lexington Police Chief Steve Crowder said communication can be difficult.

"Any emergency situation, be it the World Trade Center to our mock drill at VMI, communications is always the first thing that fails," he said. 

While the SWAT team came from the State Police barracks in Salem, Crowder said members of the local police and sheriff's departments would be the first responders.

"It's difficult, because there has never been one of these incidents when the officers arrived at the scene before the incident was over," Crowder said.

Buena Vista Police Chief A.J. Panebianco teaches rapid response classes to area officers at Cardinal Criminal Justice Academy in Salem.  He says the way police departments respond to shootings has changed since 13 students were killed at Colorado's Columbine High School in 1999.

"At Columbine the officers set a perimeter and then waited for the SWAT team, which is what you were supposed to do," Panebianco said.  "The problem is that the shooter is still in the building shooting at people.  Now you go in quickly with the first officers you have on the scene."

Panebianco said that Buena Vista and Lexington officers as well as Rockbridge County sheriff's deputies are all trained to respond the same way.

"So if there was a shooting we could go in with whoever was there first, even if some were from Lexington, and some from Buena Vista or the county," Panebianco said.
   
Panebianco said the similar training regimen is especially important in Rockbridge County because only three or four officers might be on duty in each locality.

As the planning and drills continue, officers and administrators hope their worst nightmares never come true.