OXFORD, Ohio -- Twenty-one college-aged students were taken by ambulance from the Miami University area to hospitals for alcohol-related problems last weekend, a spike that is causing concern among city and university officials.

Jon Varle, who has been an Oxford Police sergeant for more than two decades, tells wcpo.com that he's never seen the drinking problem so bad at Miami. He said the increase in drinking is challenging the city's emergency services.

"What I have seen in my time here is that the number of these highly intoxicated cases has increased and their BAC (blood-alcohol content) numbers, the amount of alcohol that they consume, has gone way up," Varley tells wcpo.com. "It is past social drinking."

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Oxford Fire Department made 21 alcohol-related runs between Thursday and Sunday, all near Miami University. Eleven of the runs were made in under three hours.

Seventeen of the people transported were female, and all but two were underage, the Journal News reports.

"This is spreading our resources very thin," Varley tells wcpo.com.

Thursday marked the end of a self-imposed moratorium on alcohol-related events by the university's fraternities and sororities during their "rush," when the organizations consider new members, the Enquirer reports.

Reports note the surge in alcohol-related incidents comes just two weeks after a Miami student, Erica Buschick,18, of Illinois, was found dead in her dorm room. It's believed alcohol played a role in her death.

Claire Wagner, a spokeswoman for the university, tells the Enquirer that sorority and fraternity leaders were upset by the drinking surge and had an emergency meeting Friday with the school's president.

"We were incredibly disappointed that we were in this position to have this conversation again when they had been so proactive and as a university, we had taken so many steps in the last couple of years to educate students about alcohol," Jayne Brownell, vice president for student affairs, tells the Enquirer. "At the same time, we thanked them and were incredibly grateful that they called for help when help was needed."

The school does have a "Good Samaritan" policy, which says students will not face punishment from the school if they seek emergency treatment for alcohol- or drug-related issues. Brownell said she hopes last weekend's surge might be related to students taking advantage of the policy.

"This is something that every college struggles with," Brownell said, according to the Journal News. "I don't think there's a college in the country that has the magic bullet to fix this."

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