<p>Yep, once a semester. But sometimes people will set off the alarms because they’re idiots. Worst was when it was set off last winter on a cold morning at 3 am.</p>
<p>I’ve always been out of the building when my dorm did drills, because they do drills at all times of the day. It’s usually only once a semester.</p>
<p>The only bad thing was this one kid who pulled the fire alarm at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. That was really annoying.</p>
<p>Sorry, but I have to agree with teachandmom that OP and the rest of his dorm are pretty immature. As she said, the drills are important in making sure that people know what to do in case of an emergency (and, as she said, they don’t have them just to be a nuisance - I’m sure the people running the drills don’t enjoy waiting in the parking lot and working with uncooperative and grumpy students any more than you do). And OP, despite your argument that colleges aren’t assuming parental responsibility, you can still bet that if there’s a fire and someone gets hurt, they will be sued if they didn’t have drills (heck, in this society, they’d probably get sued even if someone got hurt and they DID have drills).</p>
<p>And if your first instinct in case of a fire isn’t to run around in circles frantically waving your arms in the air, good for you, but that doesn’t make the fire drills useless. You can still learn things that would be useful in an actual emergency. Besides the examples given by teachandmom, here are some personal ones I’ve experienced:
-My roommate completely slept through the alarm. It took me a while to get her even partially awake, and then longer to get her to realize that we had to get outside quickly. If there had been a real fire later on, that would have been very important to know.
-Despite the fact that we’ve always been told to “leave everything behind and just get yourself out,” let’s be real, college students aren’t going to leave behind laptops, iPods, phones, or musical instruments. Having fire drills made me realize that it took me too long to gather up all the stuff I wouldn’t want to leave behind, so I learned to organize the stuff a certain way so I could grab it quickly in case the alarm went off during the night.
-Some people in my dorm learned the hard way that it’s better to take more than just a towel with you to the shower.</p>
<p>It’s little things like that, plus countless others that you wouldn’t even think of until the fire alarm is actually going off, that make fire drills valuable.</p>
<p>I guess I’ve been lucky; I’ve only experienced a couple of fire drills. I think I’ve missed some that have been during the day. It’s frustrating to have the alarm go off 5 minutes from the end of a new episode of your favorite show, though, for the drills that are at night. As for “real” fires, I think the only one I’ve seen was when someone left a jacket on a stovetop by accident. There was smoke on that floor, and the next day, there were scorch marks on the stove and fire extinguisher residue on the kitchen floor. So that was fun.</p>
<p>I third teachandmom and siemprecuriosa.</p>
<p>In the aftermath of 9/11, analyses reported that less than half of the survivors had ever entered the building’s stairwells or even knew that the building had three stairwells. Survivors said fire drills weren’t taken seriously by most and weren’t enforced well. It’s pretty likely that these adults also knew not to run in circles in case of fire.</p>
<p>I’m certainly not going to claim that a dorm building is as risky as a high rise. Still, a fire in a multi story building containing maybe two stairwells and housing hundreds of kids doing anything from drinking to sleeping is an emergency. Everyone in the building needs to know how to get out, where to go once out, and how to check in so that officials don’t waste time looking for them. The RAs need to practice guiding their floors as well.</p>
<p>And I doubt just posting maps and signs is going to help much; do you know where all the staircases are in each of your classroom buildings, and the quickest way to a safe area? At least on my campus, building maps and emergency directions are posted on the wall on each floor, but I don’t have the directions memorized and it takes me a good ten minutes to find a classroom for the first time off a map. I usually know the building pretty well by the end of the quarter, but a fire could happen the first week.</p>
<p>Sure, I agree that fire drills are annoying, especially since my college holds them at night on weekdays in hopes more people will be around. Still, it’s immature not to take them seriously.</p>
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<p>Yeah…they did it for you by putting lit up “EXIT >” signs everywhere. Coincidentally if you’re lost in a building and want to get outside they’re useful for that too.</p>
<p>One problem with 9/11 was that the stairwells were destroyed by impact and most people weren’t physically fit enough to handle that many flights of stairs. How firefighters with 70 pounds of gear on managed to do it is a-freaking-mazing.</p>
<p>@OP: The fire drill helps ensure that everyone knows the best route to exit the dorm. My dorm next year has a main staircase I’ll likely always take, but it also has two obscure ones I would only ever use/notice during a fire drill or real fire. Sure, most people will be know the best method to exit their dorm in case of a fire, but fire drills have to teach to the lowest common denominator. And on top of that, the lowest common denominators are probably the most likely to ignore fire drills if they’re optional, so it’s best to just have everyone do it. And I know you think you’re too smart for a fire drill, but don’t act like you know how you’ll react if a real, life-threatening fire broke out in your dorm. Knowing where the safest exit is could save your life when you’re in a moment of shock/panic.</p>
<p>We never had fire drills, but people occasionally would pull the fire alarm. Annoying, but I think it only happened once at my dorm, and I just went and visited friends elsewhere.</p>
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<p>I don’t think that’s the point of fire drills either because the fire drill I referred to in the OP they didn’t care how you got to the parking lot.</p>
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<p>I’ll trample others in the pursuit of escape. Preferably while shouting something like “Get the *** out of the way I’m too valuable to die!!!” 
:D</p>
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<p>Let’s let natural selection take it’s course.</p>
<p>/■■■■■ post</p>
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<p>Fine then. When a real fire breaks out we’ll see what happens to the people who were too lazy to get up thinking it’s a drill.</p>
<p>/honest post</p>
<p>And alright, I do see where you’re coming from but damn. Is it really worth having the residential life people hate you for the rest of the year?</p>
<p>"Yeah…they did it for you by putting lit up “EXIT >” signs everywhere. "</p>
<p>In a real fire, smoke might be so thick that you can’t see the exit signs, especially if the power happened to be out or something. But even with exit signs everywhere, it can still be crazy to evacuate a classroom building because although there are probably several doors out, most students probably only use one on a regular basis, and if everyone tries to get out through that one door, that’s going to be a problem. </p>
<p>I actually experienced this last year in the biggest science building on campus. I think someone had started a fire in a lab downstairs, so the whole building had to evacuate. It was chaos. Most people enter this building through the main doors in front, and when the alarms went off, most people tried to exit through those doors. But this building can contain several hundred students at any one time, so we couldn’t all go out that way. Professors were instead trying to direct some of the people through side doors. I was in one of the groups that was supposed to go out through a side door, and no one in my group knew where we were going. All we knew was that they weren’t letting us go out of the door we wanted to use, and we kind of stumbled along until we found the one we were supposed to be using. As I said, it was chaos.</p>
<p>On top of that, once we were outside the building, no one knew that we weren’t supposed to stay crowded on the plaza right in front of the building. If, for example, there had been an explosion, or emergency vehicles had needed to get through, it would have been a big problem.</p>
<p>I don’t like to think what would have happened if that had been a real fire. It took ages for everyone to get out. Another thing this shows, I think, is that even if YOU as an individual know what to do, do you still know what to do when you factor in hundreds of other people trying to do the same exact thing you’re trying to do?</p>
<p>^^ You have a point, but now you’re suggesting you should have a fire drill for every building one could possibly use on campus?</p>
<p>My dorm used to have fire drills all the time at the most inconvenient times. I learned to always have the essentials (wallet, phone, shoes, etc.) ready to go in case I suddenly needed to evacuate.</p>
<p>"You have a point, but now you’re suggesting you should have a fire drill for every building one could possibly use on campus? "</p>
<p>If that were practical, I think it actually wouldn’t be a bad idea, but obviously, it’s not. My point is just that fire drills can be useful learning opportunities, so they should be taken seriously.</p>
<p>When I was in college, Fire Drills/Alarms were very fun. A few incidents:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>My first year, the fire alarm went off 3 times in one night.</p></li>
<li><p>My second year, it went off at like 8:00 in the morning on a saturday. Had to stand outside for at least 30 minutes to an hour.</p></li>
<li><p>Not to mention the countless times some people just couldn’t walk the 2-3 feet outside to take a smoke break. Or the people who are too stupid to cook a bag of popcorn, and causing the whole floor to reek of burnt popcorn…</p></li>
</ol>
<p>My dorm only had one fire alarm go off, and that was because the fire department wanted to see whether we knew what to do. SO GLAD. It also went off at a reasonable time, at around 6pm at night. </p>
<p>There are two other dorms in my residence area (there are 3–Cuarto, Segundo, and Tercero. I’m in Cuarto) that house freshmen (the dorm I’m in mainly has transfer students, though one of the freshmen dorms also has a few transfer students) that have had fire alarms go off often, though. The area service desk is located in one of the freshmen dorms, and when I went there one time to get toilet supplies (in a suite-style dorm configuration, you get your own semi-private bathroom and you’re responsible for getting toiletries yourself), I could smell either burning popcorn or toast.</p>
<p>Without reading all the posts - here is my story and lesson. 30 years ago (in the middle of the night) an alarm went of in my dorm. At the time my girlfriend was my room. She proceeds to hide in the closet (because the RAs checked to make sure all leave) and I leave the room/building with the rest of the guys. Once we get outside it is apparent that it wasnt some drunk goof ball pulling an alarm actual flames were coming out of a window on the 4th floor almost directly below my room on the 8th floor (remember my girlfriend is up there) and as most guys (hopefully) would do I flip. As I started to make my way back towards the doors to go back up she walked out. </p>
<p>Hopefully as time goes on some will understand somethings in life are not meant to be scored … Students 1. D-bag Res Lif 0. </p>
<p>Thankfully it was a small incident and my girlfriend (now wife of 26 years : ) was smart enough to leave the building.</p>