Less than a week after Carleton’s Disability Awareness Centre (CDAC) released an open letter saying four students in wheelchairs were put in danger after they were left behind during an evacuation, the director of university safety said the incident was a “miscommunication.”
Roughly 1,400 students were evacuated from three residence buildings, including Residence Commons, when construction workers accidentally hit a natural gas line March 21.
Four residence students in power wheelchairs were left in the cafeteria, CDAC administrative co-ordinator Ashley Miller said in the letter, released March 24.
“Two staff members from attendant services were forced to stay behind and put their own safety in danger in order to address the failures of the university and fire department to respond,” the letter said.
“There was a miscommunication between the fire department,” said director of university safety Allan Burns. “But [the students] were evacuated as soon as we were aware [that] they were there.”
However, he said the miscommunication didn’t put their safety at risk since they were accompanied by attendants and never in any danger.
Miller said university safety had asked CDAC not to comment further until they had gone over what had actually happened.
Two of the students could not be reached for comment, while the other two would not comment.
Students in residence were evacuated as an extra precaution, not by necessity, Burns said, adding the four “could have been left there for much longer and would have been perfectly safe.”
Roughly 40 to 50 minutes passed while the students waited to be evacuated, the letter said, while able-bodied students were able to leave in under four minutes.
“[Students] were not locked in — they could have come out easily,” Burns said.
He said it is standard procedure for the doors to be locked from the exterior to make sure no one can go back into the area that’s been evacuated, but pointing out they were not locked from the interior.
“Fire and safety personnel had keys to get back in. If we needed to get to them, we could have,” Burns said.
Campus safety is constantly looking to improve evacuation procedures, he said, and has conducted a standard debriefing into safety operations during the leak.