On Saturday evening, five fire trucks from the Stanford and Palo Alto fire departments responded to a blaze at the model shop, which is part of the University’s Product Realization Lab (PRL).
The Stanford Fire Marshal closed down the shop and posted a sign yesterday asking that no one enter the building “until further notice.” The shop, housed in Room 616 across the street from Old Union, is most often used for woodworking.
After the call came in at 9:54 p.m., officials worried that the fire could have spread to other parts of the building or nearby structures. But the sprinkler on the ceiling activated immediately and “smoke was pouring out when the first units arrived” at 10:05 p.m., said a Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) official who was on the scene. The fire did not burn for long.
Earlier in the day, a “project was going on where students were building windmills for developing countries and learning to carve blades,” said PRL Co-director Craig Milroy, who was at the scene after the incident.
The PRL closed at 5 p.m., and nothing abnormal was reported. However, several types of manufacturing oils, all flammable, were stored in the building. The official speculated that some “could’ve been leaking on the floor and then combusted.” An electric spark might have caused the blaze, he said.
More conclusive information will be made available, pending an investigation by the Stanford Fire Marshal. The Marshal could not be reached for comment over the weekend.
“It could’ve been worse — nobody got hurt,” Milroy said. “It could’ve happened at three in the morning, when nobody was here. Luckily, some of our TAs were walking by when the alarm went off.”
On one count, the incident was a close call: the lid on a linseed oil container, which was located in the middle of the fire, almost melted through. An open oil container would have almost certainly exacerbated the blaze.
Just after midnight, officials examined the room with flashlights, checking the electrical wiring and circuit breakers. At one point, the lights in the room unintentionally turned on.
Water from the sprinkler dripped from the ceiling onto the floor. Milroy rolled a cart loaded with dry rags into the room, and in a last-ditch effort to keep the machines from rusting, he began to wipe them off and spray them with WD-40.
“I don’t know if this is going to help or not,” Milroy said.
Milroy said some equipment, most visibly the table saw, had already started to rust less than three hours after the incident.
He added that he was not sure how long that part of the PRL would be closed. The machines in the model shop will most likely have to be disassembled for repairs.
“At a certain point, it won’t make any sense to deal with them,” Milroy said.
Machine repairs are either time-consuming or expensive, he noted, and the former is especially a problem when classes that use that part of the shop are in session.
“Luckily, spring is our least busy quarter,” he added.
At about 12:45 a.m., a vehicle marked “Restoration Management Company” arrived to begin the cleanup process. A SUDPS official was at the PRL on fire watch until a new sprinkler was installed and the fire alarm system reset later Sunday morning.
“This is the first fire I’ve been involved in, that’s for sure,” Milroy said. “And hopefully it’s the last one.”
CORRECTION: In a previous version of this story, The Daily incorrectly reported that the Fire Marshal closed the PRL. In fact, he only closed the building where the fire occurred.