The Boulder Fire Department evacuated the Porter Biosciences and Gold Biosciences buildings on the CU Boulder campus mid-morning Wednesday after receiving a 911 call for “odor investigation” from someone within the building. About an hour passed between the time the call was made and when the cause, a malfunctioning sewer drain, was determined.
Students were allowed in for class, and functions resumed as normal a little later in the day. Within an hour of the evacuation, it was concluded that the problem was not a natural gas leak, as some had suspected. Rather, it was simply the result of a sewer drain not working properly. The odor was not detrimental to students’ health, said Scott Pribble, spokesperson for CU Police Department. The problem will be fixed soon and should not affect classes further.
The cause of the evacuation was initially unclear. Some students thought there may have been a fire, but that worry was quickly dispelled when the fire department refrained from deploying fire-fighting tools.
“It’s standard practice that when there’s an odor in the building that a student or faculty will pull an alarm to evacuate the building,” said Jared Ginsberg, battalion chief for the Boulder Fire Department, before the department knew the cause of the odor. “We’ve got two fire engines that responded along with CU Facilities [Management], and they’re working to investigate and find the source. They think they’ve narrowed it down to one of the rooms, so it should be taken care of relatively shortly.”
Contact CU Independent Breaking News Editor Lucy Haggard at lucy.haggard@colorado.edu.
