Why fire alarms in the Merrill Engineering Building were always so interesting.

ABC news reported on PrimeTime that their interns could "walk unchallenged to the building that houses the nuclear reactor at the U of Utah" at 12:30 am. Well, yeah, 12:30 AM is when the engineering student body is just starting to get warmed up on their lab projects. I didn't know that you could get a tour. We just knew that when the red light was on outside the door that the reactor was doing its thing.

When I was a student in the Merrill Building, the fire alarm system experienced several false alarms each summer. it wasn't just the nuclear reactor that made fire alarms interesting. It was also the small oil refinery and small semiconductor fabrication line that made us a little more earnest than usual to get out--even though we know it was probably just another false alarm.