Recent changes in the layout of campus roads have forced university and city officials to find alternative routes for responding to fire and emergency calls.
University safety officer Leslie Woolington said Mississippi State is cooperating with the Starkville Fire Department to keep the campus safe during the construction and road closings.
“There are plenty of alternative routes firemen can take in the case of an emergency,” Woolington said. “Emergency vehicles can go through [closed roads] when others can’t.”
This includes the newly developed gated parking lots, said manager of parking operations Mike Harris.
“In the gated lots, we have put sensors on the gates so that when fire engines come up to the gated lots and their strobe lights and sirens go off, there’s a frequency that the sensor reads and lifts those gates up so that they can come through and get to our buildings,” Harris said.
The university is proceeding with all construction carefully, ensuring that no hazards will arise from the creation of new buildings and parking lots on campus. Whenever new parking lots or gates are being built the university consults the fire department to ensure firefighters access to those lots or buildings.
“I know all construction is being done specifically to specs,” Harris said. “We use the correct turn [radii] of the fire engines. I would probably be aware if a fire engine couldn’t get somewhere. Someone would be calling me, and no one’s called me, so I assume they’re happy with their mobility.”
Starkville fire Chief William Grantham said MSU is very cooperative regarding fire codes.
“We’ve been working with university officials, and they have kind of kept us abreast of what’s going on to a certain extent,” Grantham said.
“We’ve had to find different routes to go to different buildings. With the street closings and the parking lots being added, the straight shots are no longer there, so we’re having to go different routes to get there, which, in turn, affects our response time.”
Once the fire department is notified of a road closing or route interruption, firefighters go out in a truck and survey different routes until they find the fastest one.
Of the four Starkville fire stations, only two normally respond to MSU alarms.
Station One responds with a ladder truck because of the high-rise structures of the campus, whereas Station Four responds with a normal fire truck.
If a structure fire is reported, Station Three will also respond for safety reasons.
The average response time for the fire department to anywhere in Starkville is about three minutes.
“For the university the response time is just a little over [the average] depending on what building we need to get to,” Grantham said. “For big sporting events, we have a truck on scene out there at all times.”
Sergeant Vic Nickels of MSU parking services said that exam week is particularly taxing on firefighters.
“Now that it’s exam time, we’ll start seeing a lot more false alarms,” Nickels said. “It’s that time of year when people pull alarms to try and interrupt their exam, and the firemen have to come and evacuate the building for no reason.”
Responding to a false alarm is not a simple matter of driving to the location, investigating and leaving.
“There’s a lot involved in false alarms,” he said. “It not only costs us money as far as operating manpower and that sort of thing, but it also puts the firefighters and citizens at risk.”
“Any time you’re [running with your red lights on] you’ve got adrenaline flowing, and it puts everybody at risk for no reason,” Grantham said. “If we’re out there looking at a false alarm then that delays our response time if we have an actual event.”