MAHOPAC NEWS

On Monday, the Mahopac Middle School was forced to close after a natural gas leak sent a strong odor into the building, forcing Superintendent Thomas Manko to cancel classes while sending faculty and staff to other facilities for reassignment for the day.

The gas leak followed last week’s rare air inversion that resulted in the evacuation of the building and the early dismissal of the school’s entire population.

Monday’s incident was traced to a defective main gas valve that began to leak the potentially volatile substance. Central Hudson Gas and Electric Company crews responded to the school and repaired the outside valve before the building was monitored, which allowed classes to resume on Tuesday.

The air inversion was a more complicated scenario. The Mahopac School District’s Transportation Depot on Myrtle Avenue in Mahopac Falls is located downhill, but upwind, from the middle school, located off Baldwin Place Road. Manko said when the transportation employees idle the buses for five minutes as they do each morning to warm the diesel engines, “diesel fumes are created. The fumes unfortunately wafted towards the middle school, since the winds were blowing in the opposite direction that morning. The cold air mass kept the diesel fumes next to the ground, resembling a fog cloud. Therefore the fumes could not escape into the air and dissipate.”

The problem was compounded when custodial staff, unaware of the air inversion, activated the school’s dampers to allow fresh air into the school outside at 7:30am. “Unfortunately the fumes were brought into the building,” Manko said.

Manko credited middle school principal Ira Gurkin and his administrative team along with the faculty and staff for “affecting a timely evacuation from the middle school to the high school gymnasium. By 10am all the children were on the buses and taken safely home.”

To prevent such an occurrence from happening again, the school has relocated a large portion of its fleet of school buses. Manko said 30 buses have been moved off-campus, with 18 of them parked off Route 6 at Croton Falls Road in a parking lot across from Mahopac Fire Department headquarters and another 13 buses parked near the district’s Learning Academy off Secor Road in Mahopac Falls. “By splitting the fleet in half the district has reduced the diesel emissions by 50 percent at the bus garage, so if the wind should ever blow in that unfavorable direction in the future, only half of the fumes will have to be contended with. So far, it’s working!”

Manko said the district was also checking on other strategies, including the “scrubbing of diesel emissions from the buses by collecting them in an air filtration system. Our transportation supervisory staff has also contacted several environmental engineers requesting their advice. The resolution process is ongoing, and it will be remedied.”

Manko told the COURIeR: “The two incidents were totally unrelated.”

­— Eric Gross