Cause of High School Power Outage Likely Lightning Strike

The cause of a that forced early closure of Monday and postponement of the ’s regular business meeting remained unknown Tuesday, but school opened as scheduled, and the day came off without an apparent hitch, school officials said.

“I saw lightning strike one of the light poles on the baseball field of the high school this morning,” one reader told Patch Monday. “It then rained down some sparks.”

But Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds Jack Denichilo told Patch Tuesday that while the cause of the outage was likely a lightening strike, his department looked into the possibility and couldn’t find anything to confirm that the cause originated from the baseball field.

“We checked the lights on the field, and we checked the breaker box and control panel, and we checked the lights, and they all worked,” Denichilo said. “We did check into it, but every light was on, and it may have hit the pole and sparked off the metal. But everything’s okay; we found no trouble at all.”

Denichilo added, “We’ve had a good day at the high school.”

On Tuesday morning Denichilo said Buildings and Grounds were “still doing diagnostics,” but that the high school “opened up without incident [Tuesday] morning.”

“We’re doing some repairs to the fire alarm system,” Denichilo said “It’s intact, but it’s being repaired. We had some lightening damage.”

As far as a lightening strike being the cause of the outage, Denichilo said, “It looks like that.”

“We have no confirmation; we looked around,” he said. “I didn’t find any kind of scorch on the building or the roof or anything.”

Business administrator Cheryl Balletto said the school district was still working on rescheduling the school board meeting.

“We don’t know yet,” Balletto said. “I’m in the process of actually calling the board members to make sure I have a quorum for certain days.”

On Monday Interim Superintendent of Schools Steven Engravalle told Patch the meeting was likely to be held on Wednesday, May 30.