Albert Wang, a first year master’s student, was walking with friends when he saw firetrucks heading toward Escondido Village Graduate Residence B. “As we got closer, the smokiness got more intense, and then we saw a big screen of smoke,” he said. “We’re like ‘oh, crap,  I think there’s an actual fire.’” 

The fire broke out in EVGR-B’s trash compactor room on Oct. 3, around 6:30 p.m., according to Wang, attracting multiple firetrucks to the scene. Over a day later, residents were still unaware that a fire had even happened.

“It was quite intense. But I still did not know what was happening,” Heesang Yoon, a third-year Ph.D. student, said.

Yoon was in his studio when he heard an abundance of sirens. He heard no fire alarms from his studio. 

“There [were] a lot of ashes and some food remnants,” Yoon said, describing the scene when he later went outside. “I thought it was from the barbecue pit, but, an hour later, I got a message that it’s from the trash.” 

Yoon and other EVGR-B residents received an email from the EVGR housing service center informing them the trash chutes would be temporarily closed and cordoned off. The message attributed the closure to an isolated fire. The trash, recycling and compost chutes in EVGR-B are still closed with no estimated repair time.

“Modern fire alarm systems in high-rise buildings like EVGR-B are designed to alarm only on the floor(s) on which the fire is detected, the floor above and the floor below,” university spokesperson Luisa Rapport wrote to The Daily. “It is typically safest for the remainder of building occupants to ‘shelter in place’ and remain in unaffected areas of the building.”

Since the trash compactor was on the first floor, the alarm only sounded on the first two floors. Once the fire was detected, “[it] was quickly extinguished by the automatic sprinkler system,” Rapport wrote. “Responding firefighters and staff…confirmed that the fire did not pose a threat to campus, and no community-wide alert was issued.”