The University of South Florida employee pushed a dolly loaded with cardboard boxes into the classroom. The room full of displaced students and faculty instantly brightened.
The USF College of Marine Science students jumped from their chairs to rip open packages filled with glass jars and gloves — mundane items compared to the millions of dollars worth of equipment students once used in their old space inside the Marine Science Laboratory nearby.
But that room, inside the Marine Science Lab, is gone. Literally up in smoke.
“It’s crazy what little things we need again,” said AJ Gross, a master’s student.
On May 2, the Marine Science Lab’s roof caught fire, sparking one of the larger blazes in St. Petersburg’s recent history. The fire, angry and hungry, burned for hours.
The inferno halted vital research, from unraveling sea level rise to hurricane rapid intensification, and left one of the largest marine research hubs in the Southeast in limbo.
For the 150 students and faculty housed in the building, the last couple months have been a series of ups and downs.
Shock. Relief. Grief. Hope.
The college is eager to get back to its mission: understanding our oceans. But complications remain, like finding space for research, accessing crucial technology and receiving the funds to become whole again.
The students, now housed in another USF St. Petersburg building, had spent the last two years catching and dissecting fish from across Tampa Bay and testing them for forever chemicals under the direction of Steve Murawski.
“People think, ‘well, we’ll just build a new building and we’ll move back in,’” said Murawski, a marine science professor.
“Man, that’s a long process.”
Reality has set in for Murawski and his colleagues that they may be scattered and working in scrunched spaces for years.
Beyond that, he worries. About the millions of dollars in grant-funded research that needs to be fulfilled. About his students graduating on time. About how to keep a vibrant, vital science community together.
“That’s what’s keeping me up at night,” he said.
A fire disrupts the scientific community
The first 911 call came in around 5:15 p.m.
A towering plume of smoke had erupted from the building. The first St. Petersburg Fire Rescue unit arrived within minutes, followed by more than 200 firefighters, including responders from an additional 10 agencies.
Just before 6 p.m., the center of the roof collapsed.
“We’ll be out there the rest of night,” one dispatcher told a caller.
By 9 p.m., firefighters had mostly put out the fire, but hot spots flared.
Lightning is the likely cause. An Albert Whitted Airport tower operator reported seeing a bolt hammer the building before the fire ignited.
Efforts by the Tampa Bay Times to get an update from Florida’s State Fire Marshal, the agency leading the investigation, were unsuccessful.
Tom Frazer, the College of Marine Science dean, was working earlier that day in the Knight Oceanographic Research Center, next door to the lab. He watched the thunderclouds roll in and the lightning crackle.
Frazer left the campus and was driving when he got a call about the fire.
“I didn’t make it home,” he said. “I came right back.”
Students, faculty and passersby watched the inferno.
One professor, Brad Rosenheim, a geological oceanographer, watched with his wife and son.
“I think it really made an impression on my son,” Rosenheim said. “I think it’s the first time he ever saw me cry.”
Luckily, no one was in the building and no one was hurt.
The blaze was contained to the aging wooden roof.
But smoke engulfed lab instruments, vials containing samples that are millions of years old and servers hosting precious research. Much of it was spared from flames, but not from smoke or the water used to douse the fire.
The college keeps its aquarium labs in a nearby building, said Dyllan Furness, a spokesperson for the college. Furness said there was a decorative aquarium, not used for research, in the Marine Science Lab and the fish likely perished.
Frazer initially set expectations low. It seemed unlikely that anything had survived the fire.
But over the next several weeks, items were pulled from the building: samples from the Deepwater Horizon spill, autonomous underwater gliders, mangroves used for carbon testing.
“People spend their entire careers here — decades — so it was important for us to try to recover those items, and do it in a safe way,” Frazer said.
“Ultimately, I think we were able to get a lot of things, certainly a lot more than we expected.”
Taking stock of what’s lost, and still remains
The life’s work of Amelia Shevenell surrounded her.
Thousands of small plastic tubes of mud — millions-of-years-old dirt extracted from the sea floor in Antarctica.
Many of the tubes were now in plastic bins, catalogued and tucked on a shelf. But some remained in cardboard boxes, dusted in salt from dried seawater used to put out the flames, mold sprouting in spots.
Shevenell and the tubes and the contents of her office pulled from the wreckage are all now housed in the lobby of the Knight building.
“A lot of what we understand about Earth and Earth’s ocean systems, we understand because of this research over the last 60 years, including plate tectonics, seafloor spreading,” Shevenell, a Paleo oceanographer, said.
The mud collected over several trips may be the last of its kind. Each expedition cost around $12 to $13 million, she said.
“These are samples right now, we can literally never recover again,” Shevenell said.
The National Science Foundation announced last year it would no longer fund the ship used in these Antarctic research expeditions. The development of a new vessel was also put on pause.
That meant retrieving the samples housed in the Marine Science Lab was even more dire.
“It hits home every day, with every box that I go through, that it’s really, really important to get these into a more stable situation,” she said.
That means that she and her doctoral student, Felipe Stanchak, have spent days looking at each sample, marking ones with seals that are broken or appear damaged.
Spotting the few that may have been heated is easy. The plastic bottles are bloated and have an iridescent sheen.
But what that means for the precious mud inside is unclear. It’s impossible to know if the fire contaminated the samples without the proper equipment.
That’s a common refrain among the college.
Researchers are ecstatic to get back precious, sometimes irreplaceable samples. But they won’t know if specimens are still viable until they can test them.
“We’re kind of transitioning to the next phase,” Shevenell said. “We have samples. We don’t have anything to analyze them with.”
Some labs are largely already up and running, like the Ocean Circulation Lab, which monitors things like algal blooms and water pollution. A week after the fire, researchers were back in the Gulf of Mexico replacing buoys used to inform hurricane forecast models.
Much of their lab survived, but over the past few weeks technology has begun to fail. Computers exposed to smoke lasted long enough to pull data, but are now fried.
“There is an unexpected part of it, like some of the equipment is probably going to fail in the future,” said Jay Law, a research engineer.
Funding remains up in the air
Outdoor stairs in the Knight building overlook the charred roof of the Marine Science Lab.
Recently, workers were ripping out parts of the building that could grow mold. The air around the lab still held the stinging smell of smoke.
The future of the building is uncertain. Frazer said the university is waiting for information from its insurance companies to account the total losses.
Last year, the state Legislature approved $10 million to renovate the Marine Science Lab after hurricane damage. The money was going toward a number of hurricane hardening projects, including a new roof.
The lab’s roof, which had likely not been replaced or renovated since the 1970s, always had issues, retired faculty told the Times. It leaked and had poor insulation, one professor said.
Renovations were set to begin soon.
“We’re waiting for the insurance adjusters to do their job and kind of put a value on the loss,” Frazer said. “Then our leadership, who’s been very supportive, will work with our legislators to see what can be done.”
After the fire, Sen. Nick DiCeglie, R-St. Petersburg, said the local delegation was unified in ensuring the college had the resources it needs.
DiCeglie said funding to rebuild the college wasn’t approved during this year’s budget session because the scope wasn’t yet clear.
“Until we find out exactly what the damages are and what insurance covers, there’s not much we can do until that estimate is completed,” DiCeglie said.
In the meantime, the college has purchased mass spectrometers, which will allow researchers to study things like water contaminants and biological samples.
But tallying the loss of some equipment, particularly the highly specialized kind, has proven challenging.
Rosenheim, the professor who had watched the building burn with his wife and son, was going through boxes moved over to his new lab space in the Knight building to determine what was salvageable.
“My situation is weird because it’s not stuff that has an easily researchable price tag,” he said.
His lab lost a handblown glass contraption used to date carbon.
Nicknamed the “dirt burner,” researchers come from across the globe to learn about it. Part of the glass on the dirt burner was broken.
It was fabricated to Rosenheim’s specifications, and it’s tricky to make. The glass is thin, and takes a highly skilled glassblower to mold.
It will take time to fix or remake the glass, to test it and ultimately get it ready for research.
“So we’re like a year out being able to host people, being able to have our students do the research,” Rosenheim said. “The only solace I have, is that I’ve done it before.”
What about the students?
Kylee Rullo-Soletti thought she’d have to quit her pursuit of a doctorate after the fire.
She’d led most of the trips to capture fish from across Tampa Bay in Murawski’s lab.
“All I could think of, is that we’ve been fishing for like a year, and when I say fishing for a year, that’s all I did — I did not get to work on anything else,” Rullo-Solleti said.
She had faith in her professors to get her through it, but she was already mourning her last year of work.
An entire year set back in her doctorate would mean postponing her life.
“I just got married,” Rullo-Solleti said. “Eventually I want a family. ... It just delays everything.”
In mid-July, surrounded by the freezers containing preserved fish specimens that made it out of the Marine Science Lab, Rullo-Solleti felt intense relief. She and her colleagues cried when the samples were carried out of the lab.
It’s difficult to say how many students may be delayed in their graduation dates.
Frazer said the college has asked each student what they need to move forward with their research. The college will find a way to continue that work, he said, either at USF or at another institution willing to lend lab space.
He’s not worried that the lack of facilities will stop incoming students or faculty from coming to the college. They have already found space in neighboring buildings.
“This is a tremendously talented group,” Frazer said. “It’s one of the top oceanographic institutions in the world.”
Layne Leggett, a master’s student, said that the fire has made her seriously consider staying at USF to pursue a doctorate. She’s seen how Murawski and Frazer have cared for her and other students in the wake of the disaster.
“I already love this community,” she said.
After the fire, she said, that connection has only grown deeper.
Times staff writers Lucy Marques and Alexa Coultoff contributed to this report.
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