Countdown to Centennial:

Fiery Wake-up Call

Campus camaraderie carried out in crisis

William B. Crawley, Jr., historian of the University of Mary Washington and distinguished professor of history, is writing a history of the institution’s first 100 years. The book will be published in conjunction with the 2008 Centennial celebration. Between now and then, UMW TODAY will run excerpts from the book. This issue’s excerpt is about an end-of-the-semester fire in Bushnell Hall.

Smoke poured from
Bushnell Hall on
Dec 5, 1980 just before
exams were to begin.
The cause: carelessness
with a cigarette.

The following is a condensed excerpt from William B. Crawley, Jr.’s forthcoming book.

Every residential student at Mary Washington has endured fire drills, those inconvenient but necessary exercises seemingly timed by fiendish design to cause maximum intrusion upon study or slumber. No student, however, has had quite the experience as that of senior Eileen O’Connell on the morning of Dec. 5, 1980.

O’Connell, a resident assistant living in Bushnell 412, was in her room when at about 6:30 a.m., she recalled, “Something was keeping me from sleeping. I could hear something in the next room like the sound of Christmas paper crinkling.”  But it was not paper crinkling; it was flames crackling – the igniting of the worst fire in Mary Washington’s history.

It could scarcely have occurred at a worse time. Classes had ended for the semester the previous day, and consequently many students had stayed up late, either studying for upcoming exams or (more likely, perhaps) celebrating the end of classes. Whether the result of intellectual endeavor or beery indulgence, the residents of Bushnell were in a more torpid state than usual when the fire broke out. “There were quite a few parties last night,” admitted O’Connell. “A few of the kids in the dorm had hangovers.”

As for O’Connell herself, she “got up and noticed six inches of smoke up around the ceiling. I woke up my suitemates and pulled the fire alarm. Then we started getting people out of the building.” One was the student in whose room the fire had started – the result, it was later determined, of carelessness with a cigarette. Alone because her two roommates were away, she awoke to find her room on fire. Unable to exit through the doorway to the hall, she managed to escape through an adjoining bathroom.

While watching their
dorm burn, Bushnell
Hall residents huddled
in the early morning chill.

Meanwhile, students were fleeing, clad only in bedclothes draped with blankets or robes, into the 32-degree morning chill.  Several male students stayed behind, armed with hall fire extinguishers, trying to do what they could to contain the blaze. Among them were junior David Hawkens and senior Mark Ingrao. According to Hawkens, “We got down on the floor when we opened the door because we knew the smoke and flames would be bad. We looked in to make sure there was nobody left in there and then tried to get as much water down as we could.”

It was all to little avail, however. Ingrao recalled that in less than a minute after the burning room was opened, the halls were filling with thick black smoke and the lights went out. “It was just a raging fire,” he said.

Ingrao continued:

There were two beds on fire, the rug was on fire, the draperies were on fire, so we started pumping the extinguishers and trying to do what we could. We stayed in there for a couple of minutes and then something in the room exploded – whether it was a light bulb or a canister or whatever. I said, ‘you know, guys, we’re not doing any good here,’ because as we kept pumping the fire extinguishers, the fire kept coming closer and closer on the rug to us. We weren’t making any headway…. so we went back the way we came, on our hands and knees, downstairs.

At that point, the dorm fire marshal reported that there were people locked in a third-floor room who were not responding to evacuation efforts. Whereupon, Ingrao remembered:

I went in and broke through the bathroom door between the two suites to find two people sleeping – a girl and a guy, both of them naked – and I wasn’t really sure what to do…. It wasn’t easy to wake them both up, but I did wake up the guy and said, ‘Help me get her dressed.’  [But] after he dropped her a couple of times, I figured to heck with it. So I grabbed a blanket and I wrapped her up in the blanket and threw her over my shoulder and [carried her outside].

It was ironic that such an episode occurred in the very dorm named for the notoriously prim Nina Bushnell, who, if grave-spinning were an actual phenomenon, would surely have been in lathe-like rotation. In any event, by the time the Fredericksburg fire department arrived about 10 minutes after the blaze was discovered, almost all of the approximately 135 occupants of the dorm were already out.  Soon thereafter, firemen completed a search of the building, despite dense smoke that greatly diminished visibility. All they found was a frightened kitten, which they rescued.

Two students comfort
each other in the
aftermath of the fire.

The first college administrator on the scene was Executive Vice President William Anderson, who tried to comfort the students shivering outside, organize them, and get them into neighboring Jefferson dorm where, soon thereafter, food service arrived to provide coffee and breakfast. A few students, still wearing bathrobes and pajamas, decided to walk to Seacobeck for breakfast. Some students from other parts of campus who did not yet know about the fire assumed that the unusual attire was simply an exam-week joke.

The fire department meanwhile had managed to extinguish the blaze, limiting actual fire damage mainly to the suite where it started, though that area itself was essentially gutted. Damage from smoke and water was much more extensive, especially on the fourth floor. Later in the day, students on other floors were allowed to re-enter their rooms where they anxiously sought to determine the condition of their belongings – most especially, given the season, their class notes. “What a time for this to happen,” said one. “All my books and notes were destroyed. How do you replace a whole semester of work?”

Even such concerns as those, however, were overshadowed by the relief that everyone had gotten out of the dorm – almost everyone, that is. It turned out that firemen, in the course of a final inspection before allowing re-entry, discovered still abed in her room on the fifth floor one student, who, quite improbably, had managed to sleep through the whole thing.

With the semester nearly at an end, temporary quarters were found in other dorms through the exam period for the fourth-floor Bushnell residents, who were given the option of taking their exams as scheduled or deferring them without penalty until the spring semester. Residents of other floors were able to return to their rooms, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the college’s physical plant workers.

Once semester break began, heroic efforts were undertaken to prepare Bushnell for re-opening on Jan. 10, 1981. When the day arrived, the dorm was ready, save for the two most damaged rooms, whose previous occupants were permanently reassigned elsewhere.  The total cost of repairs was approximately $80,000.

Eventually, as the campus returned more or less to normal, some students were able to find humor in the narrowly averted catastrophe.  Soon after the spring semester began, the residents of Bushnell designed and had printed T-shirts that read, “I survived the Burning Bush, 12-05-80.” Sale of the shirts was limited to Bushnell students who, when the shirts arrived, all wore them on the same day.

Mark Ingrao '81 helped
sleepy students flee
Bushnell Hall. "It was
just a raging fire,"
he said.

Mark Ingrao had a more personal memory. Later in the day of the fire he entered the parlor of Jefferson and, he recalled:

As I walked in there, this young lady came up to me – the person that I had taken out. She was conscious at this point, and she said, ‘I have to tell you that I really appreciate what you did for me. I just don’t know what to say.’ I looked at her and – I just had to say it – I said, ‘It was my pleasure.’ Unfortunately, she could never look me in the eye for the rest of the year.

Certainly it was a day never to be forgotten by any of the Bushnell residents, but especially by the residents of the room where the fire started. The one who was there at the time was admitted to the campus health center for smoke inhalation and released later the same day. Her two roommates returned to find only the charred remnants of their possessions. “Even though you don’t have much when you’re still in school,” said one, “I guess you could say everything we had is gone….But we’re alive and that’s what’s really important.”

Indeed – for them and all the others in Bushnell, most particularly the somnolent student on the fifth floor. And the kitten.

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