Smoked turtle
THE PURPLE TURTLE was evacuated and closed for the night after a fire alarm was triggered on Friday. The bar, busy with the weekend crowd, was forced to shut after a false alarm, the cause of which is subject to confusion.
Dan Johnson, Union Press Officer, stated that an alarm went off aroundmidnight. After it was switched off, the management of the PT decided it was not worth reopening.
One Somerville student who was in the bar at the time of the evacuation commented: "The fire alarm was ringing for about twenty minutes, and everyone was just standing around waiting for them to turn it off."
"The music stopped as soon as the alarm went off, but we weren't evacuated straight away. Eventually, the staff came round asking everyone to leave."
A source at the Purple Turtle told the Oxford Student that the evacuation was caused by someone covering a sensor in the Union above. As the two venues are in the same building, the alarms systems are interlinked. According to this source, engineers were called into the Union and spent most of the day finding the fault.
The repercussions, in the event of a real fire, of confusion over which sensor was triggered were not lost on the Union. Plans for an integrated system have been discussed and it is hoped that this will bring an end to such incidents.
24th May 2001