E.S. King Village, a family and graduate student residence, will be the final campus residence to receive sprinklers. The earliest University Housing will start designing the sprinkler system is Fall 2007.
Rob Nelson, vice president of finance of the UNC system, said the system decided to check up on the sprinkler systems in each of the 16 schools due to a few fires that occurred in some fraternity houses in the Midwest.
According to Nelson, once they reviewed all of the campus records, they found that in 1996 about 11 percent of the residence halls had sprinklers, whereas in 2006 about 65 percent of the residence halls had them.”So we [have] made a lot of progress in the last 10 years,” he said.
Nelson said the goal is to have all residence halls on all 16 campuses have sprinklers by 2010.
According to Nelson, through the research process, they found out that 85 percent of the residence halls at N.C. State have sprinklers. “The main area that is not sprinklered is [E.S.] King Village,” he said.
According to Barry Olson, assistant director for E.S. King Village, NCSU chose to sprinkler E.S. King last because it is composed of cinder block and doesn’t necessarily support the travel of fire.
Olson said now that NCSU has sprinklers in the wood structures on campus, high rise buildings and residence halls that were under renovation; it will now move onto to Western Manor this summer and E.S. KingVillage will follow. “We haven’t gone into the design phase yet of E.S. King Village and I can’t tell you exactly when that’s going to be,” he said.
According to Olson, Western Manor should take between 12 and 14 months to complete.
Joe Desousa, a first-year graduate student in chemistry, said the entire sprinkler situation feels like a public relations thing. He said the amount of fire protection is not necessarily needed when you look at the material E.S. King is made out of, concrete. “In many ways the fire protection is overkill,” he said.
Jungsoon Choi, a first-year graduate student in statistics, said she has noobjections or worries regarding the position of E.S. King Village on thelist of residences to be sprinklered in the upcoming years. “I’d say [E.S. King Village] is pretty safe [as is],” she said.
Olson said NCSU is probably the farthest along of all the UNC system schools in completing the state mandate. “We spent millions in doing all these upgrades,” he said.
