| Water line break drenches Laquey classrooms, closes school Monday |
By: Darrell Todd Maurina
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Posted: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 10:55 am
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Laquey school custodians Rod Hendrix and Jennifer Robinson clean up water damage.
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LAQUEY, Mo. (Jan. 13, 2010) — Students in the Laquey R-V School District had an unplanned vacation Monday when water lines in a ceiling deluged four classrooms and one counselor’s office.
Classes had been cancelled for most of last week, but Superintendent Bob Boulware said his staff members had been concerned about cold temperatures and were checking each day last week — except for the one day the break occurred in the water lines.
“We’d been in every day, but it was so cold that they didn’t thaw out until sometime Saturday night,” Boulware said.
The pipe breakage was in a space in the Laquey Middle School hallway above the insulated ceiling tiles that gets colder than the hallway underneath.
“I’m not sure how the cold got in there but it froze in the ceiling areas even though the hallway was heated,” Boulware said. “I don’t know for sure how many tiles we’re going to end up replacing.”
Boulware said the water cascaded down through the ceiling tiles onto the middle school floor, and then into a lower basement level that contains the classrooms and several storage areas that were also damaged. Many of the stored items were older textbooks that were no longer in use, Boulware said,
While most of the Laquey school building was still usable, Boulware said the location of the leak in the middle of the building made holding classes impossible. The Laquey school is one long series of buildings with elementary, middle, high school and administrative buildings all connected together under a single roof.
“Where it was, we would have had to move students for five classrooms somewhere else and we would have had to reroute all the middle school traffic that goes through that hallway,” Boulware said. “If it had been at one end or the other we could still have had classes, but it’s better just to cancel classes which is what we are doing.”
Boulware said the Laquey district had scheduled three make-up days into the calendar and cancelling classes for three days last week wasn’t a problem until Monday’s water issue.
“Last week we lost three days, but we had those built into the calendar. This is the first day we have to make up, but we’ll make it up on Martin Luther King Day,” Boulware said. “Richland and Waynesville are both planning on going to school on Martin Luther King Day and we send kids for the vo-tech so our kids will be able to go to vo-tech that day.
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