Evac-U8

...is the name of that goofy evacuation hood thing for sale in the duty-free catalogs on airliners. Hours of entertainment, right there.

Anyway. Last night, at around 6:50pm, I went to campus for my political science class. Much to my surprise, they were evacuating at least five buildings.

Apparantely, a graduate chemistry student spilled 250mL of liquid bromine in Jones hall, the chem building at the west end of campus. The buildings on that end of campus are all connected by a somewhat antiquated centralized air-conditioning system. So, when they spilled the bromine, they evacuated everything from Jones to the library.

Just so this is a bit clearer, I've assembled a map for you.

The red radiation symbol is where the bromine leak happened. They evacuated MSEC (orange campfire), Speare (green treble clef), Weir (pointed to by a green hand), and the library (wiiide rainbow woman). Cramer hall (yellow sheriff badge) is undergoing construction and was presumably empty. I also suspect that they pulled everyone out of Workman (blue decorative square), because it's close to Jones...although I'm not certain. I saw Hazmat crews at the purple airplane, and there was a cop positioned at the red paperclip.

Ignore the blue arrows and the brown feet. They're just for taste.

So anyway, what surprises me most about this is that the spill occured at 5:24pm and they were just getting people out of Weir and Speare at 6:45. DEADLY GASES, they said, BUT TAKE YOUR TIME!

I would expect this kind of response from the Reagan administration ... but then again, I really feel like the Gipper let me down at one point or another.

Anyway, here's the official report.