CO Close Call

Had a scary experience today. I was working downstairs in the PARACad lab today with some other people when we heard a siren-type noise. It sounded like a police car but inside the Clyde Building. I looked at the person next to me and said, "I wonder what that was...". She later left for a class and returned about 2 hours later.

When she got back she told me what had happened. This is how I heard it. I don't know for sure if it is true or not. She said that there is a lab in the Clyde basement that has Carbon Monoxide tanks that exploded. The alarm was the carbon monoxide alarm. Apparently, the people from that lab evacuated everybody from the basement,.....except for us. I mean, what's the deal? If you're going to evacuate the basement,...evacuate the whole basement. In the mean time, I was studying and I got a huge headache and felt really drowsy. Luckily I'm ok. If I had died, nobody would have heard my story.

Next Week's Police Beat

At nine o'clock AM on Tuesday Nov. 4th, police were called to investigate reported gun shots behind the Clyde Building. Cautiously, two patrol cars investigated the situation. As they poked their car nose around the corner, they saw nothing but a group of students huddled in a circle. Slowly they approached using all of their investigative skills. As they drew close to the group, the students looked up and laughed. The huddle parted to reveal a formula one race car. It was found that the "gunshots" were actually caused by the student built race car backfiring repeatedly. The officers told the students to try to get the engine timing problems worked out.

Don't be surprised if you see this in the Police Beat next week. It happened to us today. It was really funny. The officers were being so cautious. Then they were really relieved to see it was just us. Eventually a ME faculty member told us that we had to stop the engine because there were too many people around without earplugs even though there was a whole cubby full of earplugs in the facility. He said not to run it again until we had the problems worked out. The only thing is, we have to run it to iron out the problems.

Well, the car is running now anyway.