Emergency personnel, communication and text alerts worked together effectively Friday morning when several campus buildings were forced to evacuate because of a gas leak, university officials said.
The L.A. Pittenger Student Center, Burkhardt Building, Administration Building and Telephone and Postal Services Building were evacuated early Friday morning after the Muncie Fire Department received a call around 7:15 a.m. from the Administration Building about a strong gas smell.
North Quad evacuated unnecessarily, Kevin Kenyon, associate vice president of facilities planning and management, said.
Although students said the building was evacuated at about 8:50 a.m. Kenyon said it was likely a communication error.
Tony Proudfoot, associate vice president for marketing and communications, said North Quad was far from the gas leak, but the university decided the building should be evacuated for as safety precaution.
"The evacuating procedures went well," Proudfoot said. "For a gas leak there are no precise safety measurements, but we used as much precaution as possible to have everyone out of the buildings in a short period of time."
Text messages and e-mails were sent to alert students about the incident. Proudfoot said he was pleased about how the communication went.
"I think the text messages, the e-mails and the Web site all worked the way they were supposed to, although these were only secondary means of communication," he said. "We had emergency personnel on site, keeping [students and faculty] where they needed to be."
Lt. Steve Erving of the Muncie Fire Department said a gas leak filled the access tunnels under the street.
"We got some readings in the Administration Building and Burkhardt," he said. "Then we checked across the street and got a very high reading at the student center."
Jim Lowe, director of engineering and operations, said Vectren Energy Delivery workers used "sniffers" - devices that detect gas in the air - to find the leak midway between the north side of the Student Center and University Avenue.
Vectren hadn't determined the cause of the leak as of 11:15 a.m., he said. He didn't know when the gas line was installed, he said, but it wasn't recently because it's a metal line. Vectren uses plastic for its natural gas lines to cut down on corrosion and the number of joints, he said.
"If [the cause] wasn't corrosion, one would have to assume the earth shifted or settled at that location," Lowe said.
Wind blew the gas into the access tunnels through the ventilation system on the side of the Student Center, Lowe said. The tunnels connect the evacuated buildings.
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