Updated: Broken Pipe Floods FLHS Library, Heat Pump Smokes at School 1

A pipe burst in the library Wednesday, and what was thought to be a “smoke incident with a light” at earlier in the day turned out to be a heat pump in the ceiling.

“Basically a pipe in the library broke, and it flooded the library,” Fort Lee Board of Education president Arthur Levine told Patch Wednesday night. “And it’s probably going to be closed for several days. That really affects the high school; it’s huge.”

Speaking Thursday morning, Acting Superintendent of Schools Steven Engravalle provided further details, saying the incident was reported to him at about 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, and that high school principal Priscilla Church was forced to evacuate the building—although students had already been dismissed for the day—and contact emergency responders and the school district’s buildings and grounds crew.

“There was a considerable amount of water that was coming from a burst pipe in one of the heating units in the library,” Engravalle said. “It was about a one- to one-and-a-half-inch pipe that was pumping hot water that came directly from our boiler.”

He said the library will remain closed “at the minimum for the rest of the week,” but most likely into early next week as well.

“The water was so considerable that it actually did run down to a locker room below the library,” Engravalle said. “Thankfully that wasn’t a classroom where books and resources and computers would have been damaged by that amount of water.”

He added that school officials were “very thankful” that it didn’t happen last week when nobody was in the building.

“That would have been a very, very different story,” he said. “We would have had some major flooding issues as that water would not have stopped pumping.”

The boiler had to be shut off temporarily in order to patch the system, and the heating unit is going to have to be repaired or replaced at “considerable cost to us,” according to Engravalle.

“This will be an issue that we’ll have to take care of right away,” he said.

Levine also said electricians were called to Fort Lee School No. 1 Wednesday to determine where the smoke was coming from.

“But it was [custodians] Tony [Giambona] and Johnny [Arroyo] who identified what the problem was,” Levine said. “It was smoking. They thought it was a light, but it wasn’t the light that was the problem; it was a heat pump in the ceiling.”

Engravalle said the problem occurred in the adjoining hallway between the elementary school and the district’s .

“It’s above a doorway where we dismiss our Kindergarten students every day,” he said.

The problem started at about 10 a.m. Wednesday, when the power went out in one of the administrative offices, Engravalle said. A few hours later, at about 2:30 p.m., administrators noticed a “considerable burning smell” in the first-floor wing. Buildings and grounds responded and electricians were called in, thinking the problem was the result of damaged ballast in the ceiling light fixture.

“They replaced the ballast; they replaced the bulbs; they inspected; they vented the area, so [there was] no danger to anyone in the building,” Engravalle said. “Children were dismissed without disruption.”

Then, at 7:30 p.m., while Engravalle and business administrator Cheryl Balletto were still working at central office, a fire alarm went off. The two discovered “considerable smoke in the same area of the light fixture,” according to Engravalle.

The two evacuated the building and once again contacted emergency responders.

“They ran into the facility; our buildings and grounds crew responded,” Engravalle said. “Tony and Johnny, who were not on duty, were here within minutes, and they were able to discern that it was a heating ventilation pump in the ceiling, which was maybe 15 feet from the light fixture.”

He added that the ventilation pump was “completely shot and will need to be replaced right away.”

“It just shows you, number one, what great employees we have,” Levine said, pointing out that Engravalle and Balletto in particular have been working hard on the school bond referendum, in addition to having to deal with Wednesday’s problems. “You don’t find people like that—those custodians and certainly our administrators—they’re unbelievable."