Faculty and students evacuated from Faculty Hall Wednesday afternoon after a fire alarm sounded.

Associate professor of Spanish, Ben Post, was the faculty member who pulled the alarm, after seeing smoke in the west stairwell of the building.

“When I looked down through the stairwell [from the fourth floor], I could see some discoloration,” he said. “There was something in the air between me and the floor.”

Post relayed this information to his colleague, Tanya Romero-González, who was on the phone with campus police.

Romero-González said she smelled burning plastic, and some of her students had said it was gas.

Post said the police officer Romero-González was speaking with instructed them to pull the fire alarm.

“We spent about 20 seconds trying to figure out where the fire alarm was,” he said. “I saw it at the end of the hall [so I] pulled it and then the alarm started sounding about 5 seconds later, and we all evacuated.”

Shawn Touney, executive director of Marketing and Communications, said a vending machine malfunction was the cause of smoke.

Drake Harbolt, a Japanese Translation and Interpretation senior, said he had been in the stairwell 20 minutes before the alarm sounded, but hadn’t noticed smoke.

“[After the fire alarm was pulled], the trucks got here so fast,” he said. “By the time I walked out of the foyer they were here.”