Page One

Students, shoppers and UC Berkeley employees had their Monday morning disrupted when fire alarms went off in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union Building and Eshleman Hall, near the intersection of Telegraph and Bancroft Way. 

The fire alarms were not triggered by a fire, but by a broken fire sprinkler in the parking garage under Eshleman Hall. The broken sprinkler flooded a little section of the garage closest to Eshleman shortly after 11 a.m. 

“Yeah, I was down there clocking in, and then it (the alarm) started there and progressed up here (the ASUC),” said Juan SorIa, sales associate at Special Services and a junior at UC Berkeley. 

The sprinkler head was sheered off from its pipe as a California Overnight delivery truck tried to leave the garage after a delivery. The driver of the truck apparently thought that he would have enough vertical clearance to make it. He did not. 

“He got in and then he was backing out. The guy was bringing him out and the guy brought him into the pipe,” said Ken Robinson, service manager who was the attendant at the entrance of the parking garage. 

“The sprinkler head was down, but it was also too dark. When I hit it I stopped and got on top of my truck. On the back of my truck there’s like a little lip that hangs out, and so it caught the sprinkler and it popped off,” said Pete Gomez Jr., the California Overnight truck driver. 

The vertical clearance was marked at the entrance to the garage as being 11 feet 8 Inches, but there was another sign inside the garage stating that the clearance was 12 feet 8 inches. The California Overnight truck had a clearance of 12 feet 6 Inches marked on the side of the truck. 

The student union building was forced to evacuate, as well as the ASUC shops on the ground floor. Employees were told to sign off from their registers and escort their customers outside to weather the storm. 

“They are pretty good at it (getting people out). They just come through and tell you to sign off on your register and leave. You have to take whatever customer out with you, and you just wait out there,” said Beth Nelson, sales associate at Special Services and a junior at UC Berkeley. 

The UC Berkeley Extension English Language Program, which holds classes for student from around the world, had a class in the student union’s Pauley Ballroom that was forced to evacuate. The Communication Skills course was having its first day of class, when the alarm sounded. About 250 students were forced to leave and wait outside until the building was declared safe for them to return to. The alarm went off in the student union building as well because Eshleman Hall and the student union building are both on the same alarm circuit. 

Although the fire sprinklers had to be shut down in order to stop the flooding, the fire department said that they only had to shut down the parking garage sprinklers because they are on a separate line from the rest of Eshleman Hall and the student union. 

There are no official estimates on the amount of damage that was caused, and there is no indication as to who will end up footing the bill, but a maintenance official who was in the parking garage said that he thought that there would be about $2,000 in damage and that plumbers and fire alarm technicians would need to be called in.