A normal Saturday night for student residents in High Mountain East quickly turned into a questionable and scary event when fire alarms were triggered. 

On Sunday, Sept. 28 at midnight, residents were pulled from their dorms with friends and rushed downstairs outside to exit the dormitory when the fire alarms sounded. Residents were forced to leave their belongings behind and necessities such as phones, wallets, ID’s.

Students stood in front of the building waiting for an update as William Paterson’s campus police arrived and rushed inside the building. 

A resident of High Mountain East, Samantha Donovan, recounts her moments before the fire alarm went off, “I was going to knock on a friend’s door and as she came out, we noticed a kid ran up the stairs and asked if we could smell the smoke. So we went to check the stairwell, and you would barely see the lower floors. So I ran to RA Josh’s door to tell him and as we went to investigate, the alarm started going off so we all ran across the hall to the other stairs and ran down.”

After residents waited fifteen minutes, an officer exited the building and spoke to a resident assistant and gave them an update as to what had happened. The short conversation informed them that a suspected electrical fire had set off the alarm. 

Michaela Mitchell, a resident of High Mountain East who was there when the news was given says “I’m glad that it wasn’t a raging fire that would spread to the building, but I was worried about where it started and I was worried about what it would effect in the rest of the building.”

Students were not able to enter the building again for another one to two hours. While waiting to be allowed back in, groups of students resorted to a midnight Taco Bell and QuickCheck run  while others took shelter in Skyline Hall, a neighboring residence hall for sophomores. 

Students were finally able to return to their dorms around 1:30 a.m.