3:30 AM + Fire Alarm = A bad way to start the morning

As most of you probably know even though I haven't updated in a while, I am currently at Wheaton College! I got here last Thursday after spending the previous 18 days at Wheaton Passage- a trip for incoming freshman. That deserves a whole other post, but I wanted to write about the fun (not) experience we had this morning.
I had gone to bed at about 12:30 and was dead asleep when the blaring fire alarm went off at 3:30 am. Our RA had warned us that Fischer (my dorm) fire alarms are very sensitive so we end up having a lot of evacuations due to little things like steam coming from the shower. Anyway, Megan, my roommate, and I threw on jackets and headed downstairs to the main floor. It was pouring rain, but luckily my suitemate, Julie, had told us to grab an umbrella so we stayed pretty dry unlike everybody else who only had jackets on. Fischer has 5 floors of people, so hundreds of us were outside in the rain being herded to the SRC (Sports and Recreation Center). Typically we just stand outside for about 15 minutes and then go back in, but we noticed a fire truck and a few police cars so we were pretty sure it wasn't just another drill. As we waited in the SRC Gym, we had to make sure our roommate and suitemates were in the gym too and hadn't been left behind. We waited for 30 minutes before we were allowed to go back to bed-- by this time it was 4:00 am. As we were walking back we could see smoke still coming out of Fischer on the left side. We weren't told what had happened until this morning when we all got an email. Apparently the steam valve on the water heater in the boiler room blew off, releasing billows of steam. There was so much steam that even the fire department thought it was smoke from a fire.
I'm sure that we'll enjoy stuff like this even more when it's 10 degrees outside and snowing!