Monday, Feb. 5, 2024 smelled a bit off at Meramec. Dr. Moore-Davis reveals exactly what went down and how it happened.
Late Monday morning, STLCC sent out an “urgent notification” that the Social Sciences building had been immediately closed. The college said it was a precautionary measure as a result of a “burning smell” coming from inside the building. Later, they confirmed that a small fire broke out on the second floor of the Social Sciences building and that the fire department had extinguished it. At the time, the college did not release further details about what caused it or its exact location on the floor. Meramec Campus President Moore-Davis, however, has answers.
“The fire was located in the walls adjacent to the women’s bathroom upstairs,” Moore-Davis said. “I don’t know if technically I can call it a fire, but it was smoldering.
“There wasn’t any smoke in the air, but the smell… because it was in the walls and in the piping,” Moore-Davis. “There was some work that had been done, some maintenance work that included soldering some of the pipes. I’m not sure what happened thereafter, but the soldering wasn’t complete in some way, and that’s what caused the smoldering that occurred over the weekend.”
“When we walked into the building that morning, the smell was throughout the building,” Moore-Davis continued. “We were trying to discern what the smell was, so we brought in our staff to discern what the smell was. Ultimately, they said we needed to shut [the building] down to figure this out.”
Moore-Davis said she immediately walked over to the building upon her arrival to campus at 8:30am, noting that staff was already in the building trying to figure the situation out. She noted that when she walked into the building, the smell was noticeable throughout it, although in some areas more than others.
“It was intense on one part of the building, and not so intense on the other. It smelled like something was burning, but it really wasn’t heavy throughout the building.”
Moore-Davis called Brad Ziegler from the Risk Management Office, who determined that everyone would need to vacate the premises.
“I called him in,” she said, “and immediately he said that we needed to evacuate.”
Evacuations began around 9am, according to Moore-Davis. The building remained closed for the remainder of the day on Monday, but was reopened the next day for classes. Classes scheduled in the building at noon were canceled, but later classes were displaced to other rooms across campus. Classes for Professors Teri Graville, Raymond Feilner, Mary Schwartz, Theresa Nomensen and Jeffery Brubaker were affected and relocated to rooms in the Lecture Hall and Humanities East buildings.
Notably, although unrelated, this isn’t the first major infrastructure issue on the campus within the last two weeks. Bathrooms in Communication North and Humanities East were closed suddenly due to what the college called an “emergency maintenance issue” on Tuesday, Jan. 30, reopening the following morning.
Moore-Davis said that she couldn’t recall the exact issue, but “With the work being done [on the STLCC Transformed projects], I think there was something in the construction that impacted the piping for those buildings. So we had to immediately shut down because it impacted the sewer line in some way. Within 24 hours, everything was back in shape. [But] we didn’t know the extent of the damage, so that’s why we shut it down.”
