A fire on the 17th floor of Pearce-Ford Tower ousted students from their rooms for about two hours Friday night.
The fire began in a heating and air-conditioning unit at about 8:45 p.m. in room 1715, said Greg Johnson, assistant fire chief of the Bowling Green Police Department.
No one was injured, Johnson said. Two unidentified students live in the room but were not in it at the time of the fire, he said.
Johnson said he didn’t know how the unit malfunctioned.
Seven fire trucks responded to the scene. Most trucks had left at about 10 p.m.
Phyllis Skees, communications officer for campus police, said the students would be allowed in the dorm at about 10:30 p.m.
Mike Osborne, a resident assistant on the 14th floor, was at the PFT front desk when residents came and told him about a fire.
Osborne said he paged Hall Director Kevin Utt. The two men and another RA traced a sounding room alarm to room 1715.
Cloudy light gray smoke glazed the hallway, said Osborne, of Clarksville, Tenn. He smelled burning rubber that he attributed to an electrical fire.
Thick smoke poured from the bottom of the door and continued to spill out after Utt knocked on the door and opened it, Osborne said.
“You know how you cracked the lid off a grill,” Osborne said. “That’s how we saw smoke roll out of the room.”
Osborne and the group originally went to the 16th floor, where he said he heard the 1615 room alarm sounding.
Osborne said he and another RA unplugged a refrigerator from a smoking bed lamp on the wall above a bed and stopped the 1615 alarm.
Then he heard another alarm a floor above.
Osborne said he didn’t see sprinklers activate in either room.
Lebanon sophomore Tyson Thompson lives in room 1719 of PFT, but was walking from DUC when he got a call from his roommate telling him of the fire.
Thompson was worried his new Dell laptop, microwave and $150 Air Jordan might have been hurt in the fire, but he said he doubted they were damaged.
Reach the reporters at news@wkuherald.com.
Check wkuherald.com and Tuesday’s paper for more updates.
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