Monsey, NY - Teachers To Instruct Youngsters Who Jeopardized Firefighters' Lives

Monsey, NY - Teachers must go beyond the basics at a Monsey school and instruct at least three young men who jeopardized firefighters' lives that they were dead wrong. If the fire had spread, the students, and the volunteers, could have been killed.

Ramapo police said that a newspaper was ignited last week inside a boys' rest room at Congregation Anshe Sfard off College Road school, and that young people there refused firefighters' orders to leave the building. When volunteers responding to an automatic alarm arrived, they smelled smoke and properly gave the evacuation order.
Common sense tells you the firefighters are the experts and must be obeyed. Yet the youngsters would not leave until police arrived, prompting Ramapo Detective Sgt. John Lynch to say "They laughed when the fire chief ordered everyone out."

Fire Chief Meier said: "We're the ones getting out of bed at 11 o'clock at night to protect them. What will it take for them to cooperate with us? Do we have to pull one of them out of a building dead one night?" Gordon Wren Jr., the Rockland Fire and Emergency Services coordinator, adds that no adults were supervising the high school-age congregants and that the students turned off some of the alarms. He notes that the school needs a plan in case of fire. Actually, we thought that any school licensed by the state Education Department requires such a plan and frequent drills, too. What happened here?
Wren: "When the alarms go off, people should leave a building with no questions asked. In this case, the alarms went off and they silenced it."