Fire destroyed two rooms in the basement of Trinity College on February 19, including a photocopy room and the offices of Salterrae, the college’s student paper, causing tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of damages. The fire appears to have started because of old or faulty wiring in the walls, but no definitive cause has yet been named.
“We thought it might have been some of the equipment,” said Geoff Seaborn, bursar of Trinity College, “but it looks like it started in the wall, which suggests wiring. It wasn’t one of the copy machines or one of the pieces of equipment in the Salterrae room. That was what the fire department figured on the night of [the fire] and we haven’t heard from them since, so I think that’s as much as we’re going to find out at this stage.”
Seaborn said that estimates of the cost of the damage done were still in the “very preliminary” stage, but that it could be in the range of $100,000.
“The big-ticket items were the two photocopy machines, which are probably toast,” said Seaborn. He added that the cost of the cleanup, which is not yet finished, was also a significant factor in the total.
The other major cost will be the meticulous cleanup of the college’s archives, which occupy two rooms adjacent to the two that the fire consumed.
“The one area that’s sort of unknown is the cost to clean the soot off the archives,” Seaborn said. “Everywhere else we were just able to get in there and scrub it down and clean it up right away, but with the archives you’ve got to be pretty careful, so that’s going to take some kid-glove treatment and it’s going to be more costly. There’s no water or fire damage, it’s just that the smoke with the soot in it infiltrated into both archive rooms. Not too much in the main archive room, but the room across [the hall] from the copy centre, a fair amount of smoke got in there.”
“It was basically gutted,” said Aldous Cheung, editor in chief of Salterrae. “We did a check after the fire and we recovered a few things. One of the computers might still be functional, but the other two are a write-off. I was down there the first night-one of the firemen brought me down. There were two inches of water on the floor, the room was basically all black. So it was pretty bad.
Cheung said that the fire would not, however, stop Salterrae from publishing.
“We weren’t scheduled to put out an issue after reading week. Our next one is scheduled for a week [today]. I don’t forsee any problems with that because we should be able to work off our own PCs.”
Salterrae and the staff of the college yearbook had shared the office, but Cheung was unsure what effect the loss of the office and equipment would have on the yearbook production process, which is, of course, accelerating as the year draws to a close.
“I haven’t heard that they’ll be delayed in any way. As with us, I think they do a lot of work off their own machines as well. I think they’ll be OK.”
It will be several more weeks before the two gutted rooms will be available for occupancy again, but Seaborn said the college was moving as fast as it can.
“We’ve got a temporary copy centre back in service as of last Wednesday,” said Seaborn. “We’re halfway rebuilt as we speak; we just hit it right away and started rebuilding. So I think probably by the end of this coming week we should be pretty much back to normal.”
