No false-alarm prank at UNLV this time

Jeffrey Libby

Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2000 | 9:39 a.m.

When the call comes in for a fire at UNLV, the first thing most firefighters think of is "false alarm."

In most cases they are right, according to both university officials and the Clark County Fire Department. For the younger undergraduate students, pulling a fire alarm is often equated with humor, UNLV spokesman Tom Flagg said.

But on Thanksgiving morning around 9 a.m., it was no joke when an alarm went off at the three-story, 122-bed Hughes Dormitory on the Maryland Parkway campus.

And there was no student involved in pulling the alarm.

Instead, heat sensors in the unoccupied Room 105 automatically tripped both the alarm and sprinklers after an electrical short in a CD player burst into flames.

About 60 students not home for the holidays evacuated the building, some dressed only in their pajamas. Nobody was injured.

About 10 minutes later, when firefighters arrived at the scene, the fire was already extinguished, according to CCFD spokesman Bob Leinbach.

That was enough time for the sprinkler system to spray approximately 140 gallons of water through the two-person room, sending water out under the door, down the hallway and into seven other carpeted dorm rooms.

Water caused $10,000 in damage, Leinbach said. Smoke and fire damage was minimal, he said.

"The bottom line is the system worked," Leinbach said. "All large fires start small, and this one was kept in the room of origin. That's the goal and it worked."

The fire was the first on record in the Hughes Dormitory, built in the late 1980s. And it was the first dormitory fire on campus in nine years, Flagg said.