The building was a fire trap, they said.
The University of the Philippines (UP) Faculty Center (FC) went down in flames 1:15 a.m. today and burned for at least 10 hours as the Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) Quezon City tried to get the situation under control.
“We have a running joke that [FC is] just one posporo [away],” College of Arts and Letters (CAL) Prof. Patricia May Jurilla said. “It’s such a fire trap.”
The fire started in the left wing of the building, said BFP Senior Supt. Jesus Fernandez. Subsequent blazes occurred past 7:30 and around 11 in the morning, and it was only on 11:20 a.m. that the fire was finally declared put out.
Fernandez said 50 fire trucks are in the UP Faculty Center fire scene, 26 of which are from Quezon City.
Around 50 fire trucks were deployed to the area after the alert level was raised to Task Force Alpha, which requires all fire trucks in a city to respond to the emergency.
Fernandez said the building was compliant to fire safety standards when it was first built in the 1960s. However, the building was now old, he said, and the wooden ceilings and dividers between the rooms, as well as the books and documents, helped prolong the fire.
One of the possible causes of the fire was faulty electrical wiring, according to Fernandez, as there were reportedly no one staying in the vicinity at the time.
“We asked around here if anyone was sleeping in the building,” he said in Filipino. “No one was staying here, which meant no one was cooking, no one was smoking. There could have been no other source of the fire.”
The university has released an official statement, saying that the BFP recently concluded an inspection of UP buildings.
The Faculty Center was the third building in UP to fall victim to fire in the last year. The College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Association Food Center and the UP Alumni Center both went ablaze in June 2015.
Amidst the professors and students now mourning the loss of their offices and decades’ worth of documents, Jurilla urged the students to stand against the neglect of building safety.
“I think if we cannot provide [students] with a safe campus, it makes the work of the mind very difficult if the body is not safe,” she said. — with reports from Allan Yves Briones, Ma. Niña Pamela Castro, Jenele Mane and Rose Ann Solo
This article first appeared in KRISIS (AY 2015-2016) on April 1, 2016.
