About 1,400 Carleton students were evacuated from three residence buildings March 21 after a construction worker hit a natural gas line.
Students said they were told to leave the buildings around 1 p.m., but had smelled gas on their residence floors from earlier this morning. Many gathered outside the Minto Centre.
John Paul Weppler, a Prescott resident, said he started smelling gas as early as 10 a.m.
“We smelled [the gas] for a long time before they evacuated the buildings,” Weppler said.
Carleton’s director of university safety Allan Burns said he was notified at 12:01 p.m. that a natural gas line was struck by a construction worker. He said the Ottawa fire department responded immediately, and at first, the gas being released posed no threat to students.
“The fire chief was in control of the scene, and for the first while, he was looking at how the gas was dissipated into the air, and there was no real safety problem,” Burns said.
Burns said university safety decided not to use Carleton’s emergency notification system (ENS) to inform students of the leak.
Burns said that the fire alarm was better suited to the type of evacuation that needed to happen.
“We needed a very specific message to people, which was, evacuate the building,” Burns said.
“The ENS is used when we need to get information out to a mass amount of people across campus when we have information that we need them to know about so that they can react or do something,” Burns said.
“The ENS would send a message to 44 buildings on campus, and if we managed to hit everyone, 30,000 people,” he said. “We didn’t need that broad a message.”
“It came to a point that he decided that as a precautionary measure, we needed to evacuate the buildings that surrounded the area,”
Burns said university safety received word that people could return to the evacuated buildings two hours after the original call to evacuate.
He said the evacuation remains “an isolated incident.”