Flooding at Liverpool Regional High School won’t delay reopening

A school hallway filled will trash bags and fans after a flood

Cleaning up after flooding at LRHS. Photo Bradley Judge, South Shore Regional Centre of Education

A teacher is being credited with preventing extensive damage to Liverpool Regional High School when they discovered flooding over March Break.

Around 6:30 Saturday night the teacher returned to school and noticed water on the floor.

They notified the custodian who traced the leak to a defective filter under the sink in the second-floor cooking lab.

Water had soaked the floor and flowed through the first-floor ceiling.

The custodian contacted the operations department at South Shore regional centre for education and it wasn’t long before custodians and staff from several other schools across Liverpool arrived to help clean up.

Within three hours the custodians had dried all the water and a restoration contractor was brought in to assess the extent of the damage.

In addition to many ceiling tiles coming down, ceilings in the change rooms and in the wood shop had to be taken down and will be replaced.

Flood damaged ceiling tiles are torn out

Flooding damaged tech ed shop and locker rooms at LRHS. Photo Bradley Judge South Shore Regional Centre of Education

Coordinator of Operations Bradley Judge says that work is underway and will continue into next week.

But any students or staff hoping for an extended break will be disappointed.

“No worries at all about reopening. It’ll be reopened safely after March Break. We still may have a few areas left to touch up. But talking to the admin people at the school we can work around it,” said Judge. “For example, if the tech ed shop isn’t 100 percent good to go they can use another area. So very slight inconvenience, luckily.”

Judge expects the school should be back to normal within a couple of weeks thanks to the quick actions of everyone involved.

“It’s very lucky. There was a lot of water and if that teacher hadn’t have walked in it would’ve been far worse than what it was,” said Judge. “And if our staff wouldn’t have cleaned it up as quickly and as efficiently as they did we would’ve been facing something different.”

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