Last night's Senior Pub Night ended abruptly after an attendee allegedly set off a fire extinguisher on the dance floor, causing the bar's managers to shut down the event approximately two hours before it was scheduled to end.
"I just got off the dance floor and then all of a sudden this sort of light smoke covered the dance floor, and it tasted really salty, bitter almost," senior Ha Vo said. "We saw a lot of security guards yelling at us to head off the dance floor."
Senior Andrea Ness saw an individual, whom she was unable to identify, near the fire extinguisher before smoke filled the room.
"I saw some kid over by the wall, and I saw him putting down a fire extinguisher," she said. "He looked like he knew he was not supposed to be doing that."
She offered a similar account of the substance filling the air and subsequent evacuation.
"[A] few minutes later, the entire room started filling up with smoke. … Then they started clearing everyone out," Ness said. "It was obviously not fog from a fog machine."
Students were evacuated from the bar, Ned Devine's in Boston, at approximately 11:30 p.m. after the fire extinguisher was set off.
Event organizers immediately called the buses to come and bring students back to campus, according to Senior Class Council President Lindsey Rosenbluth.
Rosenbluth said she believed that the perpetrator was a Tufts student, but Programming Board co-Chair Sarah Habib denied that any Tufts student was involved.
"We think something else happened," Habib said. "There's some miscommunication there. This is not on Tufts students."
Rosenbluth said that while the event was expected to end at approximately 1:30 a.m., it was at the discretion of the bar when to close it.
Students returning from the event, many of whom had just arrived when the bar was shut down, expressed dissatisfaction with its outcome.
"I want a refund, and I think everyone else does too," senior Emily Balk, who had just arrived at the event when the bar was shut down, said.
Because the revenue collected from ticket sales for pub nights held during the academic year goes toward paying for transportation to and from the bar, no refunds will be issued to the students who purchased tickets, according to Rosenbluth.
"Asking for refunds will prove fruitless," she said.
Six-hundred tickets were made available to seniors during the week leading up to last night's event. They cost $10 each.
The event has in recent years faced cancellation because of students' rowdy behavior and inappropriate levels of intoxication. A Senior Pub Night at the end of October ended early after a similar incident in which a substance that appeared to be pepper spray was sprayed in the air, driving students off the dance floor and causing venue staff to shut down the event.
Check out Jumbo Slice at blogs.tuftsdaily.com for a video of the scene.
