Students and staff were evacuated from the Arts Building this morning shortly before 12pm after a fire alarm rang.
Lectures were cut short as the fire alarm rang through the building, with security informing students and staff to leave the building immediately.
Departure from the building was slower for those who had been in classes on higher floors due to high numbers of evacuees in the stairwells.
Students gathered in Front Square to regroup after leaving the building.
Speaking to Trinity News, Senior Sophister student Izzy Thomas Howard, who was in a seminar on the sixth floor of the Arts Building when the alarm rang, explained: “I was in my Creative Writing class and an alarm sounded, but at the time I don’t think it was fully registered that it was an alarm.”
“We just all kind of looked at each other,” she recalled. “At one point someone asked ‘is that in this building?’ It wasn’t really clear.”
Discussing the evacuation process, Thomas Howard explained that “the main corridor was quite congested, but then a woman led us to another stairway”.
Access to the Arts Building was restored within fifteen minutes.
Trinity News is awaiting a response from Estates and Facilities in relation to the cause of the fire alarm.
