Before Daniel Cooper became a Longwood celebrity, he was just a guy doing his job — checking fire alarms, writing permits and wandering around the university making sure nothing burned down. Then, he began posting on YikYak.
Cooper, Longwood’s Fire and Life Safety Officer, has become an unlikely internet sensation on the anonymous campus social app. His official title covers anything that keeps people alive on campus, but his unofficial one was gifted to him by a group of students in Lancer Productions who just started calling him “Fire Guy.” It stuck, and the honorific is now proudly displayed on his office door.
“An employee interacting with students was a new thing to everybody,” Cooper said. “I never really made it public that I was an employee here. And then when I did, that's when my popularity grew, I guess.”
Cooper, a New Jersey native who now lives in Keysville, came to Longwood four years ago from the Virginia Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — a step closer to home. Before that, he spent nine years doing safety and emergency management for the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health, Before, it was the local jail. And before all of that, he served in the Air Force in San Antonio.
However, fire safety has always been a passion for Cooper.
“When I was 13, I caught my house on fire,” he said. “The fire department showed up and talked to me about fire safety. And, now here I sit.”
Cooper said he set a toy car on fire with some tissue paper. When it got out of hand, he grabbed the closest liquid he could find to put it out. It was kerosene. Since that incident, he has been volunteering with his local fire department, the same department he now coordinates with professionally for Longwood events.
On campus, Cooper’s day-to-day is less dramatic, but no less constant. He fields work orders for beeping alarm panels, responds to calls at least once a day and manages contractor emails to keep campus fire systems running. 80% of actual fire-related calls, he said, come down to two things: students not putting water in their ramen or Easy Mac and overloading the washers and dryers in residence halls. “These are not high-efficiency front-loaders,” he said. “People pack them like they are.”
Students looking to cook smarter in their dorms will get the chance to hear directly from Cooper on April 29 at 6 p.m., when he teams up with LU BAKES for a dorm cooking safety event. Cooper will cover how to prepare food in a residence hall without triggering the fire alarm, while LU Bakes will demonstrate what items students can bake safely in the dorms.
When he is not fielding campus emergencies, Cooper teaches an occasional class in Dr. Tracie Giles’ honors emergency management course, including a session on what is known as the Waffle House Index. He also chases storms as a hobby, and runs Green Bay Woodworks, a side business he started last September after his father passed away and left behind a workshop he did not want to go to waste.
None of this, he insists, should make him campus-famous. His wife thinks the whole YikYak thing is hilarious. He remains skeptical. "Being ‘famous’ is unjustified and just weird to me," Cooper said. "I'm just a more transparent staff member than anybody else."
He is, in other words, a lot of things at once: husband, father, fire safety officer, volunteer firefighter, storm chaser, woodworker, drone pilot, occasional guest professor and perhaps most importantly, a YikYak celebrity.
Students who see him wandering campus or catch his name pop up on YikYak after a siren goes off at 2 a.m. may not know the story behind the ‘Fire Guy.’ But, they know he will tell them what is going on, and he says transparency is the whole point.
“I can go in there and say, ‘Here's what's going on, no need to worry,’" Cooper said. "Or, ‘Hey guys, get out of this area.’” For a lot of Longwood Students, that is more than enough.
