UW-Madison freshman Megan Beckner was sound asleep at 3 a.m. in Witte Hall when the fire alarm began to ring. Because of past false alarms, Beckner tried to sleep through the ear-splitting sound, but after 15 minutes she was forced out into the cold.
According to Beckner, the frequency of false alarms causes her and other students to respond to alarms with less urgency. She is still pretty confident that if there were a real fire, the commotion would get her out of bed.
Paul Evans, director of housing, agrees that false alarms are harmful because they can dull students' reactions to a real alarm.
According to Evans, student tampering is the main cause of false alarms, not system malfunctions. Students caught pulling fire alarms face expulsion from the dorms.
Aside from official punishments, Beckner and other students reported that some students are actively investigating the false alarms and trying to catch whoever is responsible and punish them. This vigilante justice is not endorsed by school officials but stems from dorm resident's anger with false alarms.
Despite student complaints that fire alarms seem to happen all the time, false alarms are down since 1997, according to Benadette Galvez of the Madison Fire Department. The installation of what are called \Screamers,"" or covers, over the alarm boxes is credited with lessening the amount of false alarms.
If a student wants to pull a fire alarm, he or she must first lift the cover, which emits a screeching alarm, before setting the actual alarm.
This device cuts down on false fire alarms, said Evans, because it makes it harder for students to get away with pulling fire alarms as a joke.
""The hope is if you're trying to do this without having anybody see you,"" he said, ""You lift that up and a number of people might stick their head out in the hall way and say 'Oh, I know him, that's Frank, he did that.'""
Not all fire alarms are caused by students, however. In 1997, a fire in a sixth-floor room of Ogg East spread to the whole floor before being extinguished by the fire department.
The popular student connection website thefacebook.com has three groups dedicated to decrying false alarms in Witte. The most popular??-""I Hate the Witte Fire Alarms and the Bastards who Pull Them!""-has 168 members.
Tampering with fire alarms is against both university and state statues and police investigate false alarms, according to Lieutenant Eric Holen of the UW-Madison Police Department. He added that if students have information about false alarms they are often willing to share with the police.
Meanwhile, students are in hot pursuit of the culprits.
""All I know is that there are people plotting against whoever did it,"" Beckner said.
