The Great Tunnel Fire, and a Return to “Normal”
Today, we are 9 or 10 weeks into pandemic “lockdown” — numbers vary depending on where you live and what your personal situation is like. Where I live, we are on the path to a gradual re-opening that is, predictably, far too gradual for some people and much too fast for others. Amid all this there has been a lot of talk about “returning to normal” and “the new normal” and what all that may look like. Which, by a thought process I won’t bother to try to trace, took me back to the fall semester of 1982, my first year in university, and the tunnel fire that devastated the underground pedestrian/locker network beneath Memorial University of Newfoundland.
The day of the fire is burned (haha) into my mind, but what I remember even more vividly is what the tunnels were like before the fire (which fortunately resulted only in damage to property, no injuries or loss of life). I had just arrived at MUN as a 16-year-old (that was the age we graduated high school here in those days), fresh from a tiny Seventh-day Adventist school, aware of most of the vices of the world but innocent of them myself. The tunnels, which ran (and still run) in a labyrinthine network beneath most of the main buildings on the south side of campus, were far more than a way to get from class to class without being exposed to Newfoundland weather. They were truly an underworld, one that was amazing and invigorating and a little bit intimidating to someone as easily intimidated as I was in the fall of 1982.
I didn’t drink or smoke or play cards or play electric guitar, but I found it oddly exciting that people did all these things and more in the tunnels, between and sometimes instead of going to class. Sitting on the floor in front of your, or someone else’s, locker was so common that at busy times, especially during lunch, it was often hard to pick your way between the river of moving bodies and the forest of stretched-out legs. Those were the days of smoking indoors, and the air was blue with smoke as well as with laughter, curse words, and often music. Impromptu tunnel parties were common. The tunnels were intended as corridors, but they were also lively, barely-regulated spaces of human contact, truly common areas whose atmosphere I soaked up even while not actually participating in most of it.
It never occurred to me that the tunnels would be any different.
Then, one day towards the end of that semester, a fire broke out in the tunnels. They were swiftly evacuated (in one of my rare acts of defying authority, I turned back to get my backpack and jacket out of my locker when I was ordered to leave the tunnel at once, and was always glad I did). The immediate result was that lot of people’s lockers and books got destroyed, and deadlines for end-of-term assignments got extended, and lots of people claimed their books had been destroyed even if their lockers were in untouched sections of the tunnels, so they could take advantage of extended deadlines. But the long-term impact went much deeper.
The front-page article from the student newspaper above tells the story well. “Following the tunnel fire last semester…” wrote Joan Sullivan (now editor of the Newfoundland Quarterly) “a severe set of rules is being enforced on those who use the tunnels.” The severe rules included no smoking in the tunnels, no keeping flammable materials in lockers, and “no loitering or congregating in the tunnels.” Student security guards would patrol the tunnels, while the main section from the TSC to the Science Building would be closed for repairs during the winter semester, according to student union VP Danny Breen (now Mayor of St. John’s). Student Union president Ed Buckingham (later a provincial MHA) expressed some concerns: he thought the rules were “a rather strong reaction. I don’t know how practical they are.”
The closing paragraph of the MUSE article identifies a key issue: “Where the students who usually ‘congregate’ in the tunnels will go is one problem no-one seems to be looking into.”
The semester during which the tunnels were closed for repair turned out to be my last as an undergraduate at MUN. I left the province to attend university elsewhere, and when I returned later as a visitor — and later still, as a graduate student — the tunnels were unrecognizable. Clean, empty, silent. If you passed through between classes you’d walk along with several people going from class to class, and maybe see a few students chatting while they stood at their lockers getting books and coats out. Certainly no-one was sitting on the floor playing cards, or perched on an amp busting out tunes on an electric guitar. And, of course, no-one was smoking (even though they would continue to be allowed to smoke in the buildings above the tunnels for years to come).
Obviously, a hideously dangerous fire-safety situation had been resolved. And something had been lost — a communal space, a benevolent anarchy, a pattern of behavior no-one had even questioned until a disaster struck.
Life did not go back to normal after the tunnel fire. Classes went on; extracurricular activities continued; the university sailed blithely on aboveground, but one key piece of student life changed forever, overnight.
Not everything goes back to normal.
When I tried these thoughts out on my husband and daughter, they were able to think of other examples — most strikingly, the changes in airport security that we all accepted after 9/11. Of course, our “normal” is changing all the time, both for worse and for better, but most of the time it changes gradually. I grew up in a time when people smoked indoors, didn’t wear seatbelts, didn’t use sunscreen, and had no computers, cellphones, or internet. The world changes constantly, but every so often a cataclysmic event comes along, disrupts our “normal,” and brings overnight changes. Changes we would have thought unimaginable before the event, that we simply accepted as normal afterwards.
So it’s interesting now, living in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, to think about Life Afterwards. Not only after we’ve “flattened the curve” but even after herd immunity, after a widely available vaccine, after most of us never think of dying from COVID-19 anymore than we think about dying from the flu. What will that “after” look like? What parts of normal will have changed altogether? What will we accept as commonplace that we never could have imagined living with up to February 2020? What will be gone forever that we assumed we would always have?
