Flood closes Monroe school
Published 10:57 pm Friday, October 24, 2008
MONROE — Classes were canceled at Monroe High School Friday after a sprinkler broke and flooded part of the school Thursday evening.
School is scheduled to resume on Monday.
A sprinkler head in a second-floor hallway broke around 6 p.m., sending lots of water rushing into the hallway, said Rosemary O’Neil, a spokeswoman for the Monroe School District. Water flowed from the hallway into an upstairs gymnasium, down a set of stairs and into the main gym, where a volleyball game was under way.
Parent-teacher conferences were also happening at the school. Everyone had to evacuate.
O’Neil said it’s unclear how much water was released.
“Water came out of only one sprinkler,” she said. “But it comes out so fast and furious that they can’t even estimate for me the amount of water. Once you turn the water off, you’ve turned off the flow of water, but there’s still water in the pipes that needs to come out.”
It will likely take weeks for school officials to determine how much damage the incident caused. Between 12 and 20 ceiling tiles need to be replaced, and possibly some floor tiles from the hallway, but it will take time to see how the gym floors dry and if they need to be repaired, O’Neil said.
School administrators are investigating and trying to find out why the sprinkler broke.
“We know the time that the sprinkler head broke and we know that around that same time there were some young people tossing a ball around in that area, but they’re still investigating how those two might be linked,” O’Neil said.
Custodians and the Monroe High School maintenance crew mopped up the water Thursday night, but school was canceled to give the fire department time to make sure the sprinkler system was working properly.
The volleyball game has been rescheduled for Monday.
Students were only supposed to be in school for a half-day on Friday and O’Neil said students won’t have to make up the day.
Reporter Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292 or kmanry@heraldnet.com.
