GILROY
– A gym stage light – left on over the weekend after a Grad
Night party Friday – was the cause of an early Monday morning blaze
that broke out at Gilroy High School, fire department officials
believe.
GILROY – A gym stage light – left on over the weekend after a Grad Night party Friday – was the cause of an early Monday morning blaze that broke out at Gilroy High School, fire department officials believe.
The fire charred the middle support beam of the GHS gymnasium and filled the building with plumes of smoke. Officials scrambled Monday to evaluate the extensiveness of the damage which will impact summer school physical education classes and a $465,000 roof maintenance project planned over the next few months.
“The job of replacing the roof was going to happen anyway, but the work has grown extensively now because of (the fire), that’s for sure,” said Charlie Van Meter, Gilroy Unified School District’s facilities director. “The district has insurance for stuff like this, fortunately.”
Gilroy fire officials did not have an estimate of the damage or an official cause of the fire by press time.
There did not appear to be a short in the electrical wiring that sparked the fire. Rather, excessive heat from the light apparently set the wood beam ablaze, Capt. Ed Bozzo said.
“The light was probably left on since Grad Night, but we’re still investigating this,” Bozzo said.
Around 6:30 in the morning a school custodian noticed the blaze and called the fire department and Jeff Gopp, GUSD’s maintenance and operations manager.
It’s unknown how long the blaze burned prior to the custodian’s arrival. Gopp said the wood beams are laminated with a flame resistant material. Had they not been, the gym could have suffered a severe amount of damage.
“Luckily the beams are flame resistant, but nothing is flame proof,” Gopp said.
Plenty of flammable decorations left over from Grad Night filled the gym less than 48 hours prior to the blaze. The items were cleared out, however, before Monday morning.
Still at 8:45 a.m. Monday, the wood beams were smoldering hours after they were aflame. The flames rekindled after firefighters tore a hole in the roof to ventilate the smoky gym. The makeshift vent gave the blaze more oxygen to burn, but firefighters quickly turned a hose back on the beam and extinguished the flames.
Firefighters spent the rest of the morning tearing down the charred portion of the beam. It’s likely the entire support beam will need to be replaced. It is one of about eight similar beams that keep the gym roof from falling. The roof did not appear to be caving in this morning.
“I’ve contacted a structural engineer whose going to evaluate this for us,” Van Meter said. “We won’t really know what has to be done until he’s finished taking a look at it.”
Roughly 220 students are enrolled for physical education courses that were to take place in the gym during the summer break. The classes run from 2 to 4 p.m. and 4 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.
“It looks like we’ll have to find another gym (for the summer school classes),” GHS Principal Bob Bravo said.
Bravo and other district administrators on the scene Monday won’t have much breath-catching time in the next few days. GHS students had their last day of school Friday, summer school begins June 23, and one day before school let out a bloody gang brawl that sent a student to the hospital broke out at Mustang Stadium.
Mt. Madonna Principal John Perales heads up the summer session at the high school which will serve 740 students this year. He was on site Monday taking the latest incident in stride, but fully aware of its ramifications.
“There are a lot of kids who were going to use this,” Perales said Monday as he paced the gym floor. “We’ll work something out.”
