Forgotten Food Finishes in Flames

A pizza box left in an electrical oven in Currier House caught fire late Saturday night, filling an entire floor with smoke and forcing the evacuation of at least 30 students from their rooms for more than half an hour.

According to Cambridge Fire Department Captain Bob Blake, firefighters responded to a fire alarm on the fourth floor of Gilbert Tower in Currier House at 12:57 a.m. early yesterday, set off when a pizza box that a student had left in an oven caught fire.

The fire was largely contained by the oven, and Blake said the alarm had been triggered by smoke resulting from the incident.

“The oven is obviously designed to take heat, so the real problem was that the fire generated a lot of smoke,” he said. “So the work of the fire department was to ventilate that smoke out of the building so that the alarm could be reset.”

Blake said that all of Gilbert Tower had to be evacuated in the incident, as is routine whenever an alarm is set off.

Melissa S. Anderson ’06, who lives on the fourth floor of Gilbert and was present during the evacuation, said that students were forced to wait downstairs during the evacuation.

“We were downstairs for at least a half hour,” she said. “A police officer came down after around 20 minutes and said that someone had set a pizza box on fire, and that we were going to have to stay downstairs for another hour. But 10 minutes later, we were allowed to go back upstairs.”

Anderson said that the smoke from the fire produced a strong odor on the floor.

“There was a really gross smell,” she said.

Currier House Co-Master and Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School Joseph L. Badaracco said that it is a standard procedure to evacuate an area when a fire alarm is triggered.

“My understanding is that [Saturday night’s incident] was just a routine event,” he said. “Stuff accumulates inside the oven, and sets on fire. The alarm is triggered by a small amount of smoke.

“I would say that every month or so someone lights a candle or leaves something in the microwave for too long and everyone has to be evacuated,” he added. “The really bad [evacuations] are the ones that happen at 4 or 5 a.m., when the students have just gone to sleep.”

Elaine L. Angelino ’06, who lives on the second floor of Gilbert, said that there was even smoke outside her room, two floors below the source of the fire.

“When I walked out of my room I saw smoke in the hallway,” she said. “But it didn’t look like that bad a fire. I was just concerned about my take-home final, which I had left in my room.”

Blake said that the last fire unit left the scene at 1:37 a.m., after firefighters had extinguished the pizza box.

“It was very efficient,” he said.

—Staff writer Reed B. Rayman can be reached at rrayman@fas.harvard.edu.