Fire at GCU in Phoenix might be arson, school says

PHOENIX - A fire Sunday morning sent students scurrying out of a GCU residential hall in Phoenix.

"There were two small fires in a third-floor study lounge area in the Agave Apartments. GCU Public Safety and Phoenix Fire Department responded and quickly extinguished the fire. No one was injured," GCU spokesperson Bob Romantic said on Oct. 27. "There is some fire and water damage in the area that will result in some students being moved to other rooms on campus."

Investigators are looking into if arson is to blame for the fire.

By Sunday evening, there was still a strong smell of burned furniture.

"He points up, and I’m like ‘uh oh,’" Ryan Muedd, a GCU student, said.

Student, Jacob Delandro, said, "Imagine waking up on a foggy day. You’re trying to drive, you can’t see anything. Pretty much like that. We couldn’t see anything."

The students were woken up by fire alarms and hallways filled with smoke.

"I was sleeping, like dead asleep. I wake up, and they’re scrambling for their stuff and there were so many alarms," Chloe Bradley said.

Muedd thought it was a false alarm until he evacuated the building and looked up.

"See those windows up there? The chairs on the other windows are right up against the glass. You couldn’t even see those. It was all completely smoked out," Muedd said.

The fires set off sprinklers on multiple floors.

"A bunch of water was dripping out," Delandro said. "The first floor got soaked."

"Fire sprinklers had been activated and successfully kept the fire in check until firefighters were able to fully extinguish the flames," Phoenix Fire said.

"Well, I guess we won’t be back in there for a while," Muedd said.

Students were alerted by an email from the GCU Public Safety Department listing the reported reason for the fire as possible arson.

"We didn’t grab anything. This is what we slept in. We’re in our pajamas," Bradley said.

The university says some students will have to be moved to other campus dorms.

"It looks like 6 suites sustained water damage as a result of the fire. Each suite contains 4 bedrooms, so those 24 students are being relocated temporarily to other rooms on campus. All other students in rooms that were unaffected in Agave (which houses about 600 students) have been able to return to their rooms," Romantic, GCU's spokesperson, said.

The Phoenix fire and police departments are working to find out what exactly caused the fire.