The Charleston Fire Department was called Sunday to University Court to investigate a burnt food incident.

The incident occurred at 3:12 p.m. in one of the downstairs apartments of the Cooper Building in University Court.

The residents were cooking supper for the evening when one of their pans overheated and started smoking up the food in the apartment.

There was not a fire in the apartment, only smoke from the pans caused the fire alarm to go off.

To get the smoke out, the fire department ventilated the apartment on the bottom floor using an electrical cord running from the generator on the fire truck and hooked up the cord to an electrical fan.

Capt. James Calvert said the fire alarms would be reset after everyone was let back into the building.

He said the smoke caused no damage.

The students were let back in around 3:32 p.m., about 20 minutes after they evacuated Cooper.

“It’s pretty much a cut-and-dry case for us,” Calvert said.

The Charleston Fire Department was also called around 2 p.m. Saturday to the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union.

The reason for this was an activation of a detector head in one of the rooms of the Union where someone was working.

The detector head was activated when some water got into it because of a plumbing project.

Cassie Buchman can be reached at 581-2812 or cjbuchman@eiu.edu.