ASHLAND — An electrical fire Friday on several floors of Ashland University’s Amstutz Hall left the dormitory unusable for the remainder of the 2025-26 academic year.
“It was a fire that started in the electrical chase (chute) … It started on the third floor and went up to the fifth floor and just burned out all the electric and the electric chases,” Assistant Fire Chief Gabe Campbell said, according to an Ashland County Pictures article.
No students, employees or firefighters were injured in the fire.
The fire left “significant” smoke, water and electrical damage, according to a press release. The Ashland Fire Division, along with several other nearby fire departments, contained the fire.
Only the third, fourth and fifth floors sustained damage, mostly water damage from the firefighters’ hoses, Vice President for Operations and Planning Rick Ewing said.
The investigation is ongoing, Ewing said, so there is not a known cause for the fire yet.
There were 142 first-year students living in the nine-floor building, all of whom will be relocated to other dorms, according to AU media relations manager Hugh Howard.
A majority of the students were moved to Jacobs Hall on Sunday and Monday, a dorm that had not been in use for a year and a half, Ewing said.
“Our intent was to make the space available, so when students came back yesterday that they could get into their rooms and they could remove their contents. So we had yesterday, almost 120 students and families,” Ewing said.
Maintenance prepared the dormitory for new residents on Saturday.
Students left for Thanksgiving break on Tuesday evening, but nine students were still in the building when the fire alarms went off, Ewing said.
AU President Jon Parrish Peede said there is not a preliminary cost estimate of the damage yet, but Amstutz Hall will be open by the start of Fall semester in 2026.
Maintenance is working to clean up the damages, which mostly consist of running heat throughout the floors to dry any remaining water.
“If we can pull that moisture out quick enough, you’re not going to have the damage that you would otherwise have,” Ewing said.
The drying should prevent the university from having to throw away furniture, carpets and other things in the building that sustained damage.
Morgan Theiss, a first-year marketing major, was one of the students moved to Jacobs Hall. She lived on the third floor. Her family helped her move into a new dorm on Sunday.
“The first thing that when through my mind was ‘were there any people in there over break? Is my stuff OK?'” Theiss said.
Theiss said most of her stuff was fine, except her backpack and posters, which were water-damaged and had to be thrown away.
“The whole campus was helping: staff, students; it was all really helpful. We were all just kind of thrown into this mess together,” Theiss said.
Overall, Theiss said the communication and campus-wide help made a stressful situation much more manageable.
