On Oct. 18, a freshman who would like to remain unnamed and her roommate began smelling smoke before they went to sleep in their Mahoney dorm room. The next morning, they woke up in a smoke-filled room.
The girls said that the smoke was pouring out of the HVAC system, the vents for the air conditioner.
“We thought [the HVAC] was going to fully catch our room on fire. So we freaked out, called maintenance, and then they weren’t answering,” she said.
After maintenance came to repair the vent, they resolved the issue and left the doors open to allow smoke to dissipate out of the room. Housing suggested that they move back into their dorm room that night.
After declining to move back into their room that still had smoke, she and her roommate were offered emergency housing in Centennial Village. They said they stayed in a hotel for two nights before moving into a room in Centennial for another two nights.
“The motor was replaced and the air conditioning unit was thoroughly cleaned and tested,” the University of Miami said in a statement to The Hurricane. “The smoke detector was also tested by maintenance staff and found to be in working condition. The students in the room were temporarily relocated to another room at their request.”
She said that when the HVAC was smoking all night the smoke detector never went off.
“People’s [smoke] alarms have gone off for burning popcorn and blow-drying their hair. Our parents were contacting [housing] about [the smoke], and they were saying there just wasn’t enough smoke. We were [thinking], ‘we have videos of the room full of smoke,’” she said.
Prior to the incident, she noticed that the smoke detector’s light was not turned on. After the incident she alerted maintenance that she thought the battery was dead but they said that it was functioning properly. When the girls returned on Monday to grab their belongings for the hotel, the light on the detector was suddenly on.
“We think they changed the battery without us knowing,” she said.
She says that since it was a Sunday, and University Housing office is not available on the weekends, the responses were slow. But the Director of Housing Operations and Facilities, James Johnson, handled the situation once he was alerted.
Once housing had figured out what was going on, they worked with the student and her roommate to mitigate the situation. They did so using fans, cleaning the smoky laundry and room, fixing the HVAC and offering them alternate housing for the time being.
This isn’t the first time that Mahoney has had smoke issues. There have been multiple fires in the laundry rooms because students don’t remove the lint from the dryers. There have been no reported incidents of fires in student rooms.
Students have reported repeated mold exposure in Mahoney-Pearson dorms in the past, and now other safety concerns like smoking air conditioners are increasing.
After many complaints from freshmen, housing authorities have made no major call to action regarding the housing situation for freshmen.