Columbia Lake Village - Housing and Residences

Fire alarm and a lot of smoke & confusion It was during my stay at the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2006 to 2007. I stayed as most international students at the Columbia Lake Village, a nice student residence with many town house for 4 students each. I was living with another German and two Canadian students. It was a Saturday, we went to a party, at 2 am we returned home and went to bed. I was waking up because of a strange sound, being really confused I thought it was my alarm clock and switched it off, still the sound and looking around in my small room, still really sleepy, I could not recognize the origin of the sound. After some minutes I stood up, opened the door and a huge wall of black smoke was in front of me. I immediately recognized that the strange sound was the fire alarm by the fire detectors that are in each house (fortunately). The first thing I saw, was one of the Canadian roommates trying to switch off the fire alarm and he said he was cooking something. I went downstairs, the smoke was really thick and bad and smelled toxic. Downstairs there was my other roommate taking care about the fire detector for the kitchen, both detectors, downstairs and upstairs, made a weird noise. We opened then all the windows and doors. The cause? One of the roommates arrived after a party at approx 2 or 3 am and wanted to cook some pasta. He switched on one of the plates but the wrong one where the lid with the plastic holder was laying. It would not have been a big problem if he wasn't also deciding to check the Internet upstairs where he fell asleep. The result was a plastic holder transforming into a huge amount of (toxic) smoke. The house was still smelling many days after this event, crazy. The fourth roommate had the same problem as me with the fire alarm sound, before opening the door of his room he unplugged all electronic devices which could have been an origin for this sound. Conclusion, improve the sound of the fire alarm because many people don't recognize it as such while sleeping. Crazy evening, hopefully no brain damage from the toxic smoke. ;-) fire alarm, columbia lake village, student residence, emergency, toxic smoke 43.4706896130225 -80.560040473938 0 http://www.tagcrumbs.com/p/OTQ2NzY 2009-02-07T18:07:20+01:00 2009-06-29T18:09:07+02:00 false Waterloo 6176823 43.466795567 -80.516389802 Ontario 6093943 49.250135627 -84.499834324 Canada 6251999 60.0 -96.0

338 Columbia St W N2T Waterloo ON Canada

http://www.housing.uwaterloo.ca/residences/clv/index.html Columbia Lake Village - Housing and Residences - University of Waterloo 2009-02-07T18:07:20+01:00 2009-06-15T14:58:33+02:00 cornelius 122613531 2008-10-18T19:16:55+02:00