West Vancouver's Sentinel secondary was evacuated Tuesday afternoon when someone fooling around with a sprinkler head managed to flood an entire wing of the school.
Firefighters were called to the campus at about 1 p.m. when the school's fire alarm went off. Crews arrived to find students already outside and water gushing from a sprinkler on the second floor of the east wing.
It emerged later that someone had locked a padlock on to the sprinkler head, and that when the lock's owner had gone to retrieve it, they had inadvertently triggered the system.
Firefighters quickly shut off the water and plugged the head -- only about eight minutes after it had been triggered, they estimate -- but by then several classrooms, a wood shop and an art room had already flooded to a depth of several centimetres. Water had also made its way into the walls and electrical systems, and had leaked down as far as the basement.
While students waited outside, the firefighters and maintenance staff set about containing the flood and vacuuming it up with special equipment.
Students were allowed back in to dry areas of the facility after about 45 minutes. The cleanup continued until 11 p.m.
Although firefighters initially pegged repair work in the thousands of dollars, the school district later concluded that was an overestimate.
"It looks like really minimal damage," said superintendent of schools Chris Kennedy. "I've been told that in most of the classrooms you couldn't tell it had happened."
The affected wing was back up and running Wednesday morning.
The students involved came forward after the incident. Kennedy said he was satisfied the outcome was unintentional.
While firefighters frequently respond to false alarms, it's unusual for padlocks to be involved, said West Vancouver division fire chief Martin Ernst.
"I've been in the fire service 25 years, and I haven't seen that," he said. "It was a prank or practical joke that went horribly wrong."
