How do you stop an exploding Commerce building? (Zoë)

With a well-timed evacuation, I suppose. An evacuation that was very efficient – congratulations and thanks should be offered to those staff involved.

I had a Biology lecture in the Copland Theatre this morning, and we had a new lecturer, who was really engaging, running up and down the stairs imitating a jellyfish. I was tired, because I’d walked into the city and back to buy tickets to the Comedy Festival (Tim Minchin on Wednesday night! Yay!), and so I was just relaxing into my seat and basically putting my feet up. But my rest was short-lived. An announcement came over the speakers, telling us that we needed to evacuate the builidng immediately. The poor guy sounded slightly panicked, which I think spread to us, because we all just started getting out of the theatre as fast as we could. Once outside, I met up with a couple of people from my college, who told me that there was a gas leak under the building and there was a chance it could explode. Now, due to the Hollywood glamour of explosions, I thought that was slightly humorous, and dare I say it, kind of cool. As we were shephered away from the builidng as fast as possible (which wasn’t very fast – think sheep), it suddenly occurred to me that if the building did blow up, I was probably going to die.

Now, that thought only lasted a second before the whole situation went back to being surreal and funny again, but for that second, I was honestly scared. In that second, death was as close as the building behind me. It was real, tangible, and scarily comprehendable. Needless to say, it was an interesting experience. Last night’s sermon at Chapel at Ormond was all about death and peoples’ beliefs about what comes after it, which I found really interesting. Last night I thought about those words in the context of last week’s Virginia Tech tragedy. I never expected to revisit them in a very present and personal sense only the following morning.

As I recounted the story to my sister later, she commented that of all the places to die, the Commerce building was fairly low down on the list. Of course, I found that extremely funny. But the little voice in the back of my head continues to remind me that it could have happened.