It's a good thing an Art Institute of Philadelphia student's carbon-monoxide detector worked on Monday. Who knows what would have happened if the gas hadn't been discovered quickly in the Avenue of the Arts building in Center City Philadelphia that houses 552 Art Institute students and two restaurants?
Philadelphia firefighters responded to the alarm at 4:20 a.m. on Monday, evacuating the estimated 250 students in the building. Three students were taken to the hospital but were in stable condition. Meanwhile, many students were still in pajamas and did not have adequate footwear during the evacuation.
"We went out and bought a lot of socks because a lot of students went out in their flip-flops," the school's communications director tells the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Many students couldn't attend their culinary classes because they didn't have the right footwear. They brought their knives but not their shoes."
The fire department registered a 300-parts-per-million reading of carbon monoxide in the building's basement, the report says. Anything above 35 parts per million is considered dangerous. The city found "serious infractions" of building codes and filed cease-operations papers for the dormitory and both restaurants.
Students are being temporarily housed at hotels, according to an Associated Press report.
All those public service announcements for keeping fresh batteries in your alarms and detectors make sense after you read things like this, don't they?
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Reader Comments Read all comments (2)
corrine of AL 1:04AM February 06, 2010
mary jane of PA 12:51AM February 04, 2010