Ponoka Composite High School was under water from Feb. 28 to March 2 causing classes to be cancelled and parents, students and teachers to be concerned.
PCHS was closed on Feb. 28 after a teacher noticed a puddle in the school while marking papers late the night before.
The water in the school was found to be coming as a result of a water main break in the computer lab. Ian Rawlinson, principal of PCHS came to view the situation and help clean up the water and could not believe the damage that was made.
“It’s a mess,” he said. “It was just an unbelievable mess. Workers had a huge vacuum blasting dirt out of the computer lab and there was literally a river running through the hallways. You wouldn’t have believed it unless you saw it for yourself.”
The school did not lose any time trying to fix the problem and called in the custodians, an electrical company and a company for the mechanical issues the school was facing.
“Our main problem was the mechanical room,” said Rawlinson. “There was about four feet of water in there and for a while there wasn’t any heat or power. There was a lot of damage to the mechanical room.”
Workers have temporarily fixed the pipe and should last for a while until a new line can run from the town water to the school.
“There is a sleeve around the pipe which has sealed it,” said Rawlinson.
PCHS has now reopened and things are almost back to normal.
“One room still looks like a bomb went off in it but it’s behind closed doors and we’ll probably lose the computer room for the rest of the year,” said Rawlinson. “But we worked really hard to get the students back in school and everything is back in place so that’s the main thing.”
Rawlinson believes that if there hadn’t been anyone at the school on Feb. 28 the damage would have been a lot worse.
“We were quite lucky that the problem was spotted right away,” he said. “Otherwise the school would have been uninhabitable.”
Rawlinson believes that although the flooding of the school was a negative happening there were a lot of positive things that came out of it.
“I phoned back 22 parents that called the school,” he said. “Each one of those parents offered to help clean up the school and was wondering what they could do to get their children back in the building. That to me was phenomenal.”
The flooding not only affected the students of PCHS on an academic level but interrupted a basketball game, a ski trip and a matinée performance of Grease.
The school is compensating for the lost days by encouraging students to come to school on the Professional Development day on March 7 to get extra help and tutoring to catch up with their school work.