A fire on the third floor of the Boccardo Business Center left San José State students scrambling on Wednesday morning.
Elaine Lê, academic adviser and building marshal for the business tower, said the fire broke out in the women’s restroom somewhere between 10:30 a.m. and 11 a.m.
“When I spoke with students, they had told me they just sat down for their class when the alarm went off,” Lê said.
The cause of the fire has not yet been determined.
Accounting senior Michael Stephenson said there was a great sense of urgency when fellow students located on the third floor heard the alarm.
“Everybody jumped because the alarm, but people were just like ‘Yeah, alright,’ ’’ Stephenson said. “People got up, and grabbed their stuff really quick.”
Similarly, business marketing senior, Anabel Cuevas said the expression on her professor’s face was the catalyst for a scary realization.
“The professor is giving a lecture and out of nowhere he looks startled, and I realized there was a loud noise,” Cuevas said. “Yeah it (the fire alarm) caught me off guard for like a second, and then everybody just started walking out.”
Cuevas said she and her classmates in ground-level classroom 022 were some of the first people to be evacuated from the building.
“It was mainly our class (outside) at first, and the class next to us,” Cuevas said. “And then slowly the crowd started coming because everybody was coming down the stairs.”
Lê, who was working in the Student Success Center on the first floor of the building said her immediate reaction was to clear out any occupants of the building.
She said when she got to the third floor, the hallways were relatively unscathed, but conditions in the women’s restroom were worse.
“I went to the third floor, the highest floor and was going to evacuate any folks in the (women’s) restroom and there was a lot of smoke and it was hot,” Lê said.
Lê said when she went to evacuate the women’s restroom, the stalls in front of her weren’t visible, having been engulfed in smoke. She said the experience was jarring.
Aaron Klemm, senior director for energy, utilities and sustainability at SJSU said while the San José Fire Department contained the flames, health and safety standards in regards to air quality are a secondary, but equally important threat.
“When the fire department had determined there was no longer an active fire threat, that doesn’t mean it’s fully safe to occupy (the business tower) to our health and safety standards,” Klemm said.
