Swift custodial response saves West from boiler room flames
Shortly after first hour had begun, students and staff found themselves evacuating classrooms on the bitterly cold morning of February 9. The fire alarm alerted, and this time it was not a drill. Something had gone wrong in the boiler room and action was needed fast.
“I was actually observing in a classroom when I heard the fire alarm go off,” Principal Erin Kohl said. “I knew it wasn't a fire drill because we didn't have a planned fire drill, so right away my reaction was ‘I need to get on the radio and find out what's going on.’ As soon as I ran out of the classroom that I was in, I got on the radio and Mrs. Smith in the office said it was coming from the boiler room.”
Prior to the emergency, head custodian Steve Abler came in at 7 am and found that there were some problems with the boilers. Specifically, there was a water leak in one of the heating lines for the building.
“What happened is we ran out of water in the system, and 11 out of the 12 boilers didn't run,” he said. “One particular boiler did not sense it was low on water and fired on a dry boiler, which started the fire. The main culprit was that we blew that 4 inch water line, and then it just was a chain reaction with everything else that happened that morning.”
There was not much time to react, but Abler and custodial staff were immediately on the case.
“My initial thought was the safety of the kids, and once I heard that the fire alarm was going off I called the office on the radio, asked where the trouble was because on our fire system panel you can locate exactly where the problem is or what caused the alarm to go off,” he said. “I was told it was in the boiler room so immediately I was a little bit panicky, but I ran down there and grabbed the extinguisher to help extinguish the fire.”
From senior Steven Reigh’s perspective, things seemed pretty suspicious from the beginning, but sooner rather than later the word got around that the fire was real.
“We went outside and we were just standing out there for a while and nothing was really happening,” he said. “Once we found out what happened we were directed to go to the other side of the street. Eventually, half the people in my group walked to Lourdes high school and the other half walked to Tipler middle school.”
Reflecting on the incident, Reigh found that students and staff did exactly as they were supposed to under an emergency, and the situation was fixed fairly quickly.
“I think the majority of kids handled it very well but of course we were all a little upset when we had to return to school,” he said. “I feel the staff handled it to the best of their ability because they probably haven't dealt with a lot of stuff like this. I'm glad that they did contact Tipler and Lourdes right away just to let them know that we were coming and that we would be arriving shortly.”
During the events of the evacuation, Reigh posted updates on his social media periodically.
“I decided to put things up because I wanted to inform people, especially since the other half of students weren't at West,” he said. “I was also being a bit comical with it as something like this seems to always happen, but I'm glad everyone was okay and that there were no injuries.”
After the fire department arrived and cleared the fire, it wasn’t long before they told Kohl that the situation was handled and safe.
“Fortunately our brave custodians were able to really contain the fire and the fire department got there and cleared it out pretty quickly,” she said. “We also had our district buildings and grounds people there making sure that we could get heat to the building. They were confident that heat could be restored, so at that point we made the decision to bus all of the students who had evacuated back to school and to resume the normal school day.”
Even though Abler has been with the school district for more than 29 years, he has never seen a fire emergency at West or even the district, which he credits to the great custodial and maintenance staff.
“It was a big learning experience, because there is an emergency stop button in the boiler room, and so if anybody walks into that boiler room, you hit that red button on the wall and it shuts all the gas, power, and everything off so it stops immediately,” he said. “If I had known that we had such a big water leak, I could have hit that emergency stop button sooner and it could have prevented the fire from happening. This particular boiler had failed safety features on it, so it might have been unavoidable.”
Looking back, Abler felt satisfied with the custodial staff’s performance handling the accident.
“My anxiety set up more after everything was done because when you get caught up in the moment, instinct takes over and you just want to get things done,” he said. “I was not really shook up or anything, but I think custodial staff like Mr. Schuhart and Mr. Langkau were, at first. Jesse Wild, who is our heating and cooling guy was also involved, and overall we all kept it pretty cool and got everything under control. When I start thinking about it a little bit more, thank goodness nothing worse happened.”
Despite the short warning, Kohl applauds everyone involved in the evacuation as well as the custodians.
“When I went on the PA system to announce the evacuation to those sites, students and staff did so, and they helped each other get there,” she said. “I heard stories of people giving coats and sweaters and things to people who were cold. Everyone got to the other schools and we got huge compliments from the staff at Tipler and from the staff at Lourdes that our students were very cooperative, calm, and that handled themselves well. I could not be prouder of our school community.”
By Javit Thao
February 26, 2021
Oshkosh West Index Issue 5 Volume 117