Finally!
A dramatic evacuation at uni, I've always wanted to be there for a full scale evacuation, nothing serious mind you, just more interesting than last year when the alarms kept going off in our stats labs in the Red Centre. And today was the day, oh yes it was. I was running late for uni, as usual, but by virtue of the fact that I was really late for one class, I was really early for another and as I walked up to BioSciences a couple of ambulances pulled up and so good looking paramedics started walking around looking important. Then I noticed a couple of HAZMAT units over near the entrance of Wallace Wurth and realised they were evacuating Wurth. There seemed to still be people coming and going from BioSci so I went in and caught the lift up to my lab, at this stage the alarms weren't going off. So I go into the lab, and John's the only person in there and I ask him why they're evacuating the building. He thought that they had the wrong wing because he heard that someone had capped a bottle out of the fume cupboard in the other wing of BioSci and the fumes made people sick and they were worried it was a gas leak. Never mind, he said, get your stuff out. About five minutes later he came back and told the three people that were now in the room that we had to leave, and what do you know, there's all these firemen stalking around the corridors.

Long story short, they cleared one floor at a time, which was about 400 people and gradually made us move away from the building, but uni students that we are, and scientists at that, everyone wanted to mill around and check out the action. There was, after all, no smoke coming out of the building. By then the police had shown up and they started yelling at us to move back, and I guess because they carry guns and can arrest you, people started moving back. While all this was going on the fire guys were suiting up in biohazard HAZMAT gear to go and clear the building and a TV news crew and other assorted journalists (inclusing a photographer wearing a flak jacket that said "MEDIA", snigger) had begun to gather. Around 11.30 I got bored and told John I was going home since clearly it was going to take ages to clear the building and we'd taken enough "I was part of the trauma" first person photos with Pete's camera phone to keep me happy.

Fully dramatic.