ART INSTITUTE OF PHILADELPHIA STUDENTS EVACUATED AS CITY INVESTIGATES ALLEGED SAFETY-CODE VIOLATIONS
More than 550 students from the Art Institute of Philadelphia remain out of their dorm rooms in an old Center City building today while its owners and city inspectors meet to go over alleged safety-code violations, some serious, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer_.
The city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections ordered owners of the seventeen-story Avenue of the Arts building to fix, among other problems, an inoperable fire-alarm system and an improperly maintained emergency/standby-power system.
Some 250 students from the Art Institute were evacuated from the building, at Broad and Chestnut streets, about 4:30 AM Monday when a student’s carbon monoxide detector went off.
Fire department personnel later took carbon monoxide readings and found a “relatively high” carbon monoxide reading of three hundred parts per million in the building’s basement, according to fire captain Richard Davison. More than thirty-five parts per million is considered dangerous, he said.
