Alerts have gone out twice for Clowes Memorial Hall this semester. Photo by Lauren Hough.
ELLA HALL | STAFF REPORTER | erhall@butler.edu
This semester, four separate gas leak alerts have been sent out to students through Dawg Alerts for Atherton Union, Jordan Hall and Clowes Memorial Hall.
The alerts went out due to reported instances of odor in each of the buildings, which were then responded to by the Butler University Police Department (BUPD) dispatching emergency services who worked with the Butler facilities department to adequately locate and fix each issue.
Junior arts administration major Emma Huser was working in Clowes Jan. 30 when the first instance of gas odor was reported.
“Patrons [were] coming up to the box office, going, ‘There’s a gas leak. You should probably call that in.’ So, after like the third person mentioning it, someone called it in,” Huser said. “The police had us evacuate to Lily Hall because it was too cold outside.”
Roy Betz, captain of police administration for emergency preparedness and training for BUPD, spoke on the importance of Dawg Alerts that are sent out in response to issues like gas leaks that the public needs to be made aware of quickly.
“When you get a Dawg Alert, it’s for a very important message,” Betz said. “We’re very careful in how we send those Dawg Alerts out, because we don’t want to send out so many that students, faculty and staff say, ‘that’s another Dawg Alert. I’m not going to worry about it,’ right? When you get that text message from us as a Dawg Alert, it’s something that’s very important that you need to pay particular attention to.”
Huser claimed that she did not get the Dawg Alert for the incident until much later, and that she tends to ignore the alerts from other buildings.
“I feel like I would hear the fire alarm before I hear the Dawg Alert,” Huser said. “I don’t know if I’m in like, a second wave or third wave of people that get Dawg Alerts, but I, for some reason, get Dawg Alerts way slower than everyone else does.”
She expressed her surprise that Clowes has been affected by gas leak issues, and recalled being told that the issue was not regarding natural gas, but rather the boiler.
Rusty Vineyard, Butler’s associate vice president for facilities and operations, explained the process of addressing the gas incidents in Clowes from his end.
“They couldn’t find anything that was causing the smell,” Vineyard said. “So the ‘all clear’ was given. And then when it happened again, they ended up finding a small fitting that was emitting some odor that had come loose, [which] was rectified.”
The incident in Jordan Hall, he said, was a sewer trap rather than an actual gas leak. He explained that when the sewer pipes get dry, they can often emit a gas-like smell.
Vineyard emphasized that the recent alerts are not related and are not cause for public concern.
“I think every situation is unique to the sense of what it might be, and it could just be [a] coincidence that they’ve happened in a row,” Vineyard said. “Like anything else, they need [to be] exercised, or they need scheduled maintenance, or things checked, and sometimes we don’t know about it until an emergency happens.”
There have been no further gas odor alerts since Feb. 23.
