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Water damaged four classrooms and a storage room at La Entrada Middle School in Menlo Park on Thursday evening after an underground pipe joint came loose during construction work at the school and flooded the linoleum-tiled floors to a depth of about 4 inches.
A passing pedestrian spotted the water bubbling out from under the classroom doors at about 6:30 p.m. on July 5 and called 911, said Harold Schaupelhouman, chief of the Menlo Park Fire Protection District.
Firefighters shut off the water, called Dee Brummett — La Entrada’s principal until she retired July 1 — and began cleaning up.
At the time, Menlo Park firefighters were busy with grass fires in Palo Alto and East Palo Alto, but enough were available to make the La Entrada incident a “full first-alarm assignment,” Chief Schapelhouman said.
The firefighters “worked so hard” with squeegees and mops, said Ms. Brummett. Immediate damage, she said, was limited to inconsequential paper that happened to be stored on the floor. Textbook-bearing cupboards, with bottom shelves about 5 inches off the floor, just escaped.
The linoleum may have been soaking for four hours. A joint-powers group called the San Mateo County Schools Insurance Group, which insures the Las Lomitas school district, has engaged a “property restoration” company to dry out the classrooms and check for long-term impacts, said Joyce Massaro, the district’s interim maintenance operations and transportation supervisor.
Landscape workers excavating a courtyard had turned the water back on at about 2:30 p.m. after repairing a 3/4-inch copper water pipe that they had not expected to be in that patch of ground, said Shawn Sanfillipo, a construction manager with San Mateo-based Callander Associates, a landscape architecture firm.
Unknown to the workers, a joint about 20 feet away from the repair point “somehow must have wiggled loose,” Mr. Sanfillipo said. A properly soldered joint should not have failed like that, he added.
There are more courtyards to be renovated near classrooms with sinks that presumably have similar pipes supplying them. “Now we have to look at every courtyard,” Mr. Sanfillipo said.
