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I was down in the physics lab at school last night and had just finished using the Neon Laser to align the Fabry-Perot interferometer when the fire alarm sounded.

Well, fire alarms go off all the time on Campus. It's one of those things. One went off on Monday during my Calculus test. As a rule, evacuations are slow, and there's a lot of 'is this real, or is this just a malfunction, or some ass trying to get out of a test.'

Not so this time. The alarm went off, and the door to the room were we were working jerked open. My professor said "Everybody out," and inside of five minutes, the whole building was emptied.

This is what happens when you spend your time in a building with several high level biolabs, physics labs, and chemistry labs.

We'd been outside maybe three minutes before the first fire trucks arrived. There were five in the first batch, and they just kept coming. Fire engines, paramedics, a hazmat team. In the end, there were about two dozen cops, twenty fire trucks, four cop cars, and about half of plant, and there was just no dicking around at all.

We were outside for about 45 minutes, and I never found out for sure what happened, but whatever it was, it must have been fairly minor, because the hazmat teams never went in, and they let us back in to finish up our work. Still, lots of excitement.

Below is a little bit of what happened (click on the thumbnail for the full size image: