Smoke Scare at NDSU

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Fargo Fire and Police rush to NDSU this morning after reports of smoke in an engineering building.

With chemicals in the building the hazmat team was ready.

KVRR’s Erin Lisch is in the studio with more.

Alison and TJ,

Crews were called to the civil and industrial engineering building because of smoke in a lab.

There was no fire, but they did find the source of the smoke.

NDSU staff member Jan Lofberg said, “I was very scared I ran right away to call somebody.”

NDSU Faculty and staff worried about a possible chemical emergency in the lab.

Dilpreet Bajwa who works in the building said,”When I came out of the lab to the main office, there was a slight odor, some kind.”

Hazmat teams were ready, but found no chemicals connected to the smoke.

Fargo Fire’s Battalion Chief Lee Soeth said,”It has the potential of turning bad very quickly…lots of hazmat monitors out so we can make sure there is no problem before we send a fire crew in.”

The culprit was found to be a drier used for plant experiments. Fire officials say it malfunctioned.

Lofberg says the room was filled with smoke when she checked the lab,”We went in there to check out the smoke and it was pretty thick so yeah we had to obviously put our…i had a sweat shirt on so i put it over my face.”

The response time was impeccable from law enforcement.

“We timed them and it was like 4 minutes and that was really neat because I was worried what was going to happen with the labs. We have a lot of experimentations and that costs a lot of money,” said Lofberg.

Nothing was damaged other than the malfunctioning drier, and no one was hurt.