Fire alarms, earthquakes and floods

This blog is mainly going to be a rant about first years and an update on natural disasters in the UK.

First of all the rant.  Ok, the first years here are insane. I mean I’m all for a good party and I’ve been going out a lot since I’ve been here and its great… I love the night life.  However, when things escalate from a party to drunken violence, well, its just not cool.  Not to mention the sheer level of alcohol consumption… I’m willing to bet even seasoned Oktoberfest veterans would have a hard time keeping up to some of the students here.  Apparently the first year marks do not count towards the overall GPA for a degree here so first year is basically a pass/fail system.  As long as you pass you are good to go.  Basically that means the first years can afford to do limited work during the semester, then cram like mad before exams and hope for the best.

Seriously though, there is a whole section of Crewe flats occupied by first year English students and so far people from three of the dorms have been arrested and are basically waiting to be kicked out.  It’s been a little annoying for the rest of us because the fire alarm has been pulled three times in the last two weeks, always at three or four in the morning.  The first time it happened I guess the guys were having a party and some of them got into a fight… the fight escalated to throwing fire extinguishers at each other… a stained glass window worth 1000 pounds got smashed… and finally someone pulled the fire alarm to stop the fight.

Of course we didn’t know any of this at the time and were standing outside in the damp Sheffield air in the middle of the night in bare feet and PJs wondering what was going on.  It took twenty minutes for them to sort things out and turn off the alarm so we could go back to sleep and we still didn’t know what was going on until a couple days later when the damage in the main hall, including slashed couches and blood on the walls, was linked with the fire alarm incident.   Last week the fire alarm got pulled twice in one night… we’re assuming it’s the same guys, or friends of the same guys, mad about their imminent expulsion.

To make it even more dramatic, the first night that the fire alarm was pulled was the night after the earthquake so we were all a little hyper-sensitized.  Honestly when the fire alarm first went off, in my half asleep state my first thought was, ”Oh no another earthquake!”

In case you didn’t hear about the earthquake, it happened in the early morning of February 27.  Here is what teh BBC news said the next day:

“The biggest earthquake in the UK for nearly 25 years has shaken homes across large parts of the country.

People in Newcastle, Yorkshire, London, Cumbria, the Midlands, Norfolk and also parts of Wales, felt the tremor just before 0100 GMT.

The British Geological Survey (BGS) said the epicentre of the 5.2 magnitude quake was near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire.

Davie Galloway, seismologist for the BGS, said people had reported feeling the tremor from as far as Bangor in Northern Ireland to the west, Haarlem in Holland to the east, Plymouth to the south and Edinburgh to the north.”

I was still awake and sitting in my room reading when it happened.  At first I thought it was someone trying to get into my room or maybe some construction going on or something, but pretty soon the radiator was rattling and everything was shaking enough that I figured it out.  I mean Crewe flats is a huge stone building so it would take something like an earthquake to make things shake that much.  It was pretty exciting though and it didn’t last long enough for me to get really scared or anything.  And of course everyone was talking about it the next day.

Today the big news is the winter storm sweeping the country.  There were 82 mph winds and flooding in Cornwall yesterday.  The storm is expected to hit Northern England today, but it looks like Yorkshire won’t really be affected… which is a good thing because tonight is a Sheffield United vs Coventry football game!

(I’ll try not to get into any fights with the Coventry first years!)