KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) -- Three fraternity houses have voluntarily closed their doors on the U.T. Campus. State fire marshal's inspections revealed numerous code violations. They say the problems must be fixed before anyone can go back inside.

The inspection report detailing the violations is six pages long. These problems didn't come up overnight. In fact the university says it did an inspection of its own in October. We wanted to know how a building inspected in October wound up with so many problems just two months later.

The young men who live in fraternity houses may act like they don't have a care in the world. But after what the state fire marshal's office found, the ones living in these three houses on the U.T. Campus should have been worried about whether they'd survive if a fire broke out.

Mark Boyd, East Tennessee Codes Enforcement Supervisor for the state fire marshal's office, says, "Obviously the fire alarm system, that's a big hazard. The emergency signs exit light, all of this stuff has a part in the event of a fire."

It was the event of a fire alarm that brought the fire department to Pi Kappa Phi last Friday. KFD reported what they saw to the state fire marshal. Inspectors found plenty of problems here on Saturday. They came back Tuesday to inspect other houses. Two of them had big problems too. Lamda Chi Alpha and Sigma Phi Epsilon. With everything from broken glass and doors to fire alarms torn from walls, all three decided to voluntarily vacate the buildings. Their only other option was to hire a trained fire watcher to be here around the clock until all problems are fixed.

Ron Laffitte, U.T. Associate Dean of Students, says, "Safety is obviously a very top priority for us."

The University is required to inspect the houses once each semester. They did that in October. So how could the houses have so many violations after the University inspected them just two months ago?

Laffitte says, "That's a good question. It varies house to house. This particular house, whether the house just deteriorated, whether the house just deteriorated since October, whether things had occurred in the house, I don't know."

The houses weren't due to be inspected again until early next year. But that was before the Friday fire alarm changed everything.

Laffitte says, "This jump-started his office looking at other fraternity houses just to make sure they were safe."

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KNOXVILLE, Tenn (WVLT) -- Residents living in three on-campus fraternity houses have voluntarily closed their doors after a Tennessee State Fire Marshal found several fire code violations during inspections.

The three are:

* Pi Kappa Phi
* Lambda Chi Alpha
* Sigma Phi Epsilon

Occupants of all three homes were given two choices, voluntarily vacate or hire someone to keep a trained 24 hour fire watch at each of the homes until the violations were fixed and the homes re-inspected, according to Mark Boyd, the East Tennessee Code Enforcement Supervior for the Fire Marshal's office.

Violations in the houses were discovered after the Knoxville Fire Department repsonded to a fire alarm at one of the homes on December 12th.

Fire code violations in some of the homes include broken windows, no doors, and broken, damaged, or missing smoke detectors, or fire alarms, according to Boyd.

A fourth fraternity house, Phi Kappa Psi, accepted a state mandated 24-hour fire watch in September. They were re-inspected and passed on October 16th.

Volunteer TV has a crew on the scene. Stay connected to Volunteer TV news and VolunteerTV.com for continued coverage of this developing news story.