Gas Leak? It smells like bad garbage!

That's what one lunch lady at my friends kids elementary school said yesterday. My friend works at the charter school during lunch a couple of days a week. Yesterday they were fortunate she was there. One of the ladies cleaning tables off in the gym came in saying that it smelled like gas, but she thought it was the garbage that stunk. My friend went out and smelled it and screamed for everyone to evacuate the building. They did get the building evacuated,however it did take some time. She shewed the kids out of the gym only to find them a few minutes later in the hall. She yelled as loud as she could to get the teachers attention to get their students and get out of the building, there was a gas leak. They finally listened and got everyone out of the building.

I showed up to drop off a kindergartner at the same time this mass confusions was going on. I figured I would turn off our van and wait outside the main door where the kindergartener's enter, which is right by the gym. The little boy I drop off got out to wait by the door and a lady told him not to go into the gym and shewed him away. I had the little boy come back into the van to wait for his teacher. I watched dumb founded as another little boy ran through the open gym door and into the building. They aren't allowed to enter the school until their teacher opens the door. I just felt something wasn't right, but there wasn't anyone around to tell us what was going on.

Finally about 6 minutes later a lady came and told us we needed to evacuate the parking lot and to move our vehicles because they had a gas leak. I moved and watched as emergency vehicles poured in all around the school. You would think that a school would have a better procedure for taking care a this kind of emergency.

It brings up my key point. What procedure do my kids schools have in place in case this kind of emergency happens. I know that my kids schools have better procedures in place than what the charter school did, because I was the health and safety commissioner for my son's elementary school and many of their teachers are on the committee to help establish the safety procedures that they follow. They also meet with the school board and talk about what they are doing. MY KIDS schools have an evacuation plan so they can move the kids off of the school grounds to another location still within walking distance from the school.

As a matter of fact only a few years ago they had a fire at the middle school and evacuated the kids off premises and then called parents. They also worked closely with the radio station and other media sources to get the information out to the parents about what was going on.I told my friend they may want to discuss something like this in the future, so they could move the kids off the school grounds to a place that would be safer.

Looking at the place they had the kids go, in my own personal opinion, it wasn't far enough away from the building. I thought about the house that had the gas leak and exploded here a mere couple of months ago it affected the houses around it. The kids probably would have sustained a lot of injuries. It's a charter school so I don't know what procedures they follow. It just seemed like there was a lot of confusion. We were okay and things ended good, but what happens if it happens again? I hope they learn from the experience. It could have ended badly but it didn't and for that I'm very grateful.