A fire alarm sounded off in the College of Business Administration building Wednesday around noon, causing students and faculty in the building to evacuate for nearly two hours.
At 1:47 p.m., BeachALERT sent out an email notifying students that power had been restored to the building and classes would resume at 2 p.m.
“Apparently a transformer blew up and it created a lot of smoke, which is why the alarm went off,” CBA advisor and building marshal Linda DeLange said. “That’s the point at which everyone was evacuated.”
Fourth year human resources management major Emilee Kappitz was in class when the alarm sounded.
“The alarm went off and then faculty in orange vests started telling us to leave the building,” Kappitz said. “They had us stay on the grass away from the building and no one was telling us what was going on until students started to question them.”
Kappitz added that the building marshals did not inform them of what was going on at first because their first priority was making sure everyone had evacuated the building.
R.J. Cayabyab, a student assistant for LBSU Facilities Management, said people were already working on the transformer earlier in the day due to smoke emitting from the machine.
“Facilities was already trying to fix the transformer and they were forced to shut down the power to fix this problem,” Cayabyab said. “This issue affected all the lights, elevators, air conditioning and any electrical equipment.”