HDAE Heroes

Santa Catalina Residence Hall Fire Incident

A quick response from staff across many campus departments — Housekeeping, Residential Operations, Residential & Community Living, Fire Department, UCPD, and EH&S — helped avoid a more serious situation in Santa Catalina Residence Hall. Of special note are three HDAE heroes that rose to the occasion during this scary event:

• Rosalba Cuevas (not pictured), the Housekeeper who cleans and helps maintain the 6th floor.
• Pedro Rivera (left), Housekeeping Lead.
• Juan Paniagua-Guzman (right), Building Maintenance Worker.

Rosalba was performing her cleaning duties on the 6th floor at 12:41pm when she smelled smoke. She immediately called her Lead, Pedro Rivera. Pedro was on the first floor near the elevator of that tower and asked Juan Paniagua-Guzman, who was walking by, to join him in responding to the call. Upon arriving at the student room, a resident exited, said there was a fire and quickly evacuated. Juan quickly retrieved a nearby fire extinguisher and extinguished the fire that had engulfed a trash can (estimated to be three feet high). At the same time, Pedro called 911 and all three staff assisted the Resident Assistants with evacuating the floor. The response of these three Housekeeping staff members was so swift that the Life Safety systems (smoke detectors and sprinklers) did not activate for a full building evacuation.  

After the Fire and Police investigations were completed and we regained access to the space, our Residential Operations team performed diagnostics on the life safety systems. All were in working order and would have alerted had the smoke and/or heat reached the sensors. The response of Rosalba, Pedro, and Juan truly stopped this incident from becoming a much more significant event. I am proud to serve with such an excellent team!