Recently, a fire alarm went off in Cunningham Hall on IIT’s Mies campus, causing a mass evacuation of all dorm buildings. After some initial confusion where people couldn’t tell which was Cunningham, Kacek, or Carmen, the fire department stormed Cunningham’s fourth floor, where the alarm system said the smoke was coming from.
“We were coughing the moment we entered the building!” said a shocked firefighter as they left the building. “For something so small – I mean, smoke normally rises, right? We thought it would be way worse given how quickly we needed to put on respirators.”
The team ran up the stairs to the fourth floor. (They considered taking the elevators, but as we all know, the dorm elevators are never actually working.) The scene they found was grim. Several students were passed out on the floor, with smoke still pouring out of a counter in one of the floor lounges.
“We followed the source of the smoke and found someone passed out on the floor in front of the microwave. They looked like Beaker from the Muppets after one of their experiments went horribly wrong. I’ve never actually seen that happen in real life,” the firefighter continued.
One of the firefighters opened the microwave to find a bag of popcorn emitting smoke into the air. “Honestly, I didn’t know that a single bag of popcorn could produce that much smoke. It was a little impressive,” the firefighter chuckled. The team closed it into one of those heavy-duty metal containers that you’ve seen in movies for bomb detonations and carried it out of the dorm, at which point the air started to clear up.
In a press conference later, the fire chief announced that they have never seen popcorn smoke this bad. However, the popcorn was fine, and “just a little singed, nothing that some melted butter can’t fix.” There is no word yet on whether or not the students near the explosion are safe or what their medical condition is.