A commerce student has burnt down the entire Lincoln University campus this morning after a friend suggested he should “burn the midnight oil” in order to complete an assignment.
19-year-old Alan Turner says he is beginning to fear that he may have misinterpreted his friend’s advice after the Christchurch Fire Service was forced to dispatch the majority of its resources to deal with an ever-worsening situation.
By 10am this morning, the entirety of Lincoln’s main campus was ablaze, and by 1pm, most of its structures had either been compromised or collapsed completely.
But Turner is still refusing to apologise for the blaze, saying he will “wait and see” how things pan out before deciding whether or not to be sorry.
Christchurch’s chief fire officer, Dan Coward, said that while police were still interviewing the youth, firefighters understood that he had used “somewhere in the range of 24 litres” of crude oil, believing that the more he used, the better his assignment would be.
“On the surface, it makes a lot of sense,” said Coward. “But you dig a little deeper into the idea, and there are some subtle flaws at work there. So I think what we’re saying to students – and we’ll continue to update our stance on this as things develop – but I think what we’re saying at this stage is, if you’re having difficulty with that essay or your doctoral or whatever, setting things on fire isn’t really the answer.”
Turner has acknowledged that, while he was already struggling with his assignment, burning down campus “didn’t help at all.”