Got burned by Fire Safety? The crew made their rounds last week, and if you’re reading this far, you probably got slapped with a $50 fine for having incense in your Fauver triple or whatever. Don’t want to pay it? Have an hour to spare? Wesleying just received this pro-tip from an anonymous source:
I’m sure some poor suckers got slapped with that brutal $100 fine from Fire Safety. But one anonymous RA dropped this
gamechanging news that there is a way to get out of paying it! Please investigate this to see if its true, because if so its the best kept secret on campus! “Anyone who does get written up, they won’t tell you this, but you can get a hundred dollars of your fines refunded if you go to an hour long firesafety seminar (they hold them every other week in USDAN during lunch)…”
So I contacted Fire Safety Coordinator Christine Cruz for clarification. Turns out not only is this the truth, it’s also not really a secret—it appears directly on Fire Safety’s website (though only seems to be applicable for a first offense $50 violation). Here’s the full text of the policy:
If you have received a fine for a fire safety violation, you may be able to attend a fire safety seminar in lieu of payment of only your first violation ($50 Credit). Everyone who has received a fire safety fine will receive an email notification and be directed to check the fire safety website for specific information about the dates of the scheduled seminars. See the listing below.
- Unless you have made alternative arrangements, you will have until the end of the academic year in which you received a fire safety fine to attend a fire safety seminar before your student account is charged.
- Student accounts will not be charged until the end of the academic year in order to give students adequate time to complete a fire safety seminar.
- You may only attend one fire safety seminar per academic year. If you are fined for a repeat violation for the same offense in a prior academic year, you must contact Campus Fire Safety to determine eligibility for attending a fire safety seminar.
You must have your WesID or some form of identification with you when you come to the seminar. Since seminars occur during lunch time you are allowed to bring food. You will be asked to turn off and put away all electronic devices.
tl;dr: Save your moneys, attend a seminar. And as Andrew Trexler ’14 urged last year in a notorious email: “don’t bring candles, don’t bring incense, don’t bring George Foreman grills, don’t bring lethal weapons, don’t bring anything with an exposed heating element that could catch fire and burn down your building and kill some freshmen that can’t figure out how to escape, don’t mess with the smoke detector, don’t set your stuff on fire, don’t set other people’s stuff on fire, and don’t leave forbidden items lying around your room for Fire Safety to find during Room Inspections.”