Around 7:45 p.m. on Saturday, February 4, Carter Hall residents found their evening interrupted by a relatively routine phenomenon: a fire alarm. Unlike many other alarms, however, this one was not false: a curtain drape in the southeast corner of Carter Lobby had been set on fire.
Just a few minutes previous, Joshua Crisp (‘24) and Elizabeth Ertel (‘24) had walked into Carter Lobby and seen that the curtain was on fire. “It really shocked us,” Crisp said in an interview the following Monday morning. Ertel told Crisp to pull the fire alarm and immediately called Stephen Dillon, the Carter RD. Crisp also called his RA, making sure he understood the urgency of the situation. “I told him that this was legit, I know that fire alarms happen a lot, but this one is real.”
All residents were able to evacuate from Carter in a timely manner, and no one was injured in the process. Student emergency responders quickly arrived and contained the fire even before the fire department reached the scene.
Within the same minute that Crisp pulled the fire alarm, sensors in the sprinkler system above the curtain activated due to the heat of the fire and triggered alarms in the school’s security systems. Corey Dupree, director of Facilities Management, was on the front lines of coordinating the immediate cleanup response. “As soon as I receive a phone call, I get on the phone with my direct reports, which are the supervisors of other areas… I told them to get their folks prepped because we didn’t know what we were going to find.”
Dupree worked with the fire department to get the sprinkler system shut off, make sure everything was under control, and then move into a recovery phase. The biggest task was not the damage caused by the fire but containing the water that had come from the sprinkler.
“Everyone was literally shoveling water,” Dillon recalled, describing the inch of standing water across the lobby and into the Great Hall. “They went to work so fast and got so much water out of the building so quickly. It was really impressive.”
Dupree and his team turned their attention to making sure that students could get back to their rooms as quickly and as safely as possible. “Getting the sprinkler system back online, getting the fire alarm reset… there’s a lot of details that need to be reset before student occupation.”
On Monday, local news sources reported that the Dade County Sheriff’s office arrested and charged 19-year-old Trotter Raymond Clark with one count of arson. In an official statement from the college on Sunday afternoon, Brad Voyles confirmed, “This individual is not a member of the Covenant College community but was known as a local resident.”
Many students found this knowledge unnerving. Even before the name and identity of the individual was revealed, Crisp reflected how “[the email from Brad Voyles] was extremely scary. To know that me and Elizabeth had probably just missed them by a few seconds is pretty scary. I’m really glad that they tracked them down that night.”
“It’s disappointing,” Dupree echoed. “It’s disappointing because we have so many great staff and we had to call them out of their homes, away from father-daughter dances, and say ‘can you respond?’”
At the same time, Dillon, Dupree and Crisp all reported feeling grateful that no one was hurt and that the building sustained minimal damage. Crisp reflected, “I think that the fire department and the facilities and Covenant authorities did a really good job of cleaning it up and getting it ready for us to move back in.”