Last week, the classrooms of KHS could be found empty as fire alarms wailed and five distinctive words rang out from the intercom system: “This is not a drill.”Lisa Autry, chemistry teacher, was using a small block of magnesium undergoing a chemical reaction for one of her class demonstrations when some of the smoke given off by the block caused a school evacuation.
“Let me first say, there was never a fire,” Autry said. “I’ve done this demo a lot, and it’s never set off the fire alarms before.”
Autry said she was not aware that it was her class that caused the evacuation because of the delay between the experiment and the activation of the alarm.
“There were probably four minutes between [the experiment] and the fire alarms,” Autry said. “One student actually said ‘I wonder why the fire alarm doesn’t go off when you do that.’”
When teaching her other classes the same lesson after the evacuation, Autry made sure to take extra precautions with her demonstrations.
“When I did [the same experiment] later in the day, I did it under the fume hood to avoid the same thing happening again,” Autry said.
