A couple days after a fire in the basement of LaFollette Complex, student stories are beginning to surface.
Some residents say they slept through the blaring fire alarms until they were awakened by emergency workers. Some say they didn't hear the alarms over the music from the iPods they wore to bed. Some even say they slept all the way through the night and didn't find out until later that day that there had been a fire.
These reasons for missing the evacuation are somewhat excusable.
Other students say they heard the alarms and intentionally ignored them.
Inexcusable.
Most students have lived in residence halls unless they have always commuted to campus, so most know what it's like to be roused from bed on a freezing November night for a fire alarm.
It isn't pleasant.
But even less pleasant is your bed catching on fire while you're still in it.
All students who have lived in university housing have heard that buzzing, screaming alarm and considered ignoring it, figuring it was just another drill or another bag of burned popcorn smoking up someone's microwave.
This attitude makes sense considering that Ball State University halls have had 85 fire alarms since the beginning of 2008 and only four of those were because of fires.
Early Wednesday morning, though, the situation was much more serious than usual.
Coincidentally, the university sent out a video Tuesday (the day before the fire) to all students who live in residence halls about the importance of getting out of the building if they hear an alarm.
This was one mass e-mail students should have given some attention.
Burned popcorn or other minor kitchen mishaps probably cause a majority of alarms to go off. Students should use Wednesday's blaze as a reminder of how important fire safety is, even if they are just making macaroni and cheese in their floor kitchen.
The real lesson to take away, though, is that these alarms shouldn't ever be ignored.
It's one thing to not hear an alarm and miss an evacuation; that is accidental, at least. But it's another thing to intentionally skip important safety measures.
False alarms will continue to jar people awake in the middle of the night, but real fires will also continue to break out every so often. Neither can be totally avoided.
Skipping an evacuation might seem like a good idea when you're half asleep and it's cold outside, but it won't seem that way if a real emergency occurs.
It only takes one bad decision to really get you burned.
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