Students Escape Fire

  The downtown fire on Sunday night didn’t only devastate the buildings, businesses and community but also Bloomsburg students. The blaze caused 28 students to be displaced from their homes and forced to start anew, seeking shelter elsewhere. The fire took away the majority of the students’ belongings due to catastrophic damage done to their apartments, including clothing, books and computers. 

   Currently the apartment buildings on West Main Street are closed off and students have not had the opportunity to find out if any of their personal belongings are salvageable

 “It’s a complete disaster,” said Amreen Nostapha, a junior international student who lived in her apartment for more than three years.  On Sunday she was awoken to the sound of fire alarms at 5:30 a.m. in her apartment building where the fire began at148 W. Main Street.  Nostapha lived the room believed to be the source of the fire on the second floor.  She lived in the apartment for more than three years.  Nostapha was not injured physically from the fire, but lost “pretty much everything,” she said.  Her apartment did not actually burn but it was flooded with water. Fortunately, she recovered her passport and some legal documents.           

   “I was impressed by the bravery and fortitude of our students and the non-students who thankfully escaped without injury, but lost almost everything in the fire,” President Dr. David Soltz said in a written statement.  “Many had grabbed their cell phones and almost nothing else,” he stated.

“I’d say 99 percent of my stuff is destroyed, whether it was burned or as far as water damaged,” Alfred Lanza said, who lived on 158 W. Main Street, which was affected by the fire.  “Some of the firefighters talked to us about how much [personal belongings] they could bring out and they just said most of it is pretty much gone, as far as TVs, computers, everything was just floating in water, so it’s pretty much not salvageable.”

            “At first I really thought they would be able to contain the fire, “We just sat there for the next eight hours and watched them work on it and it burned and just got burned,” said Lanza.  “It just got out of hand real quickly and I didn’t expect that to happen.  But, the buildings are just so old that you don’t expect it to be up to standards of today.”

            After the initial stages of the fire, President Dr. David Soltz and Professor George Agbango transported students from the scene of the incident within hours.  Students were taken to the Residence Life office on campus to receive emergency aid, according to a written statement by Soltz.

   “The residence life staff was doing an outstanding job of comforting the,” Soltz said.  “Residence Life made arrangements with students who requested temporary on-campus housing, in addition to providing meal cards and replacing student IDs for the student victims.  “When the students went back to campus, they were provided with emergency supply kits and, most important, debit cards to purchase some new clothing, coats and shoes,” Soltz said.

  By mid-afternoon on Sunday, most displaced students were temporarily housed on campus by the Residence Life staff, according to Soltz.  Residence Life provided makeshift shelters for the students by utilizing spare rooms or study lounges in residence halls.  In addition, a student with a three-month-old baby is being housed at the apartment in the Magee Center, according to Linda Sowash, the director of Residence Life. 

  In addition, six students who were home for the weekend returned to Bloomsburg on Monday to find that their apartments had been damaged in the fire and that their belongings were lost.  Those students were sent to the Residence Life office for emergency relief when they returned to Bloomsburg on Monday, Sowash said.