George Sessions, Alina Choudry and Callum Hardy report
With fire raging out-of-control only 20 yards from his office, a university lecturer carried on working for nearly half-an-hour after the alarm sounded.
At approximately 8am fire broke out in the shop at the University of East London’s Docklands Campus. The fire alarm went off at 8.20am, London Fire Brigade was alerted, and UEL’s fire marshals cleared the building of all its occupants. At least, that’s what they thought. But one lecturer, who does not wish to be named, carried on working at his desk, thinking that this was just a routine fire alarm test.
‘Every week it goes off just before 8.30am,’ he explained. ‘When I heard it I thought, there it goes again, regular as clockwork. It was more than 20 minutes before I remembered that this was Thursday – and the alarm always goes off on Wednesdays. That’s when I realised it wasn’t a test.’
At this point the lecturer left his office and made his way downstairs to the ground floor atrium, which by that time was ‘quite smoky – the place was foggy with smoke and the smell of burning’. He walked quickly along the atrium and out of the building, ‘sneaking past’ the fire marshals stationed at the entrance to prevent anyone going in. ‘Silly of me, really’, he admitted. ‘I put myself at risk with my own casual attitude. The best you could say is I acted like an absent minded professor.’
Additional reporting by Rian Watson, Felix Denton, Stuart Ballard, Josh Harris, Daiane Fernandes and Kris Cannon