On Thursday evening around 6:45 p.m., Soldotna Elementary School Principal Austin Stevenson was in the Safeway parking lot.
“I got a text message from the automatic – the fire alarm company saying that there's an alarm at the school,” he said Friday.
Stevenson got in his car and drove to the school. When he arrived, a group of soccer players who'd been playing in the gym were standing outside.
Stevenson did a sweep of the building to make sure everyone was out, then went looking for the fire. He found it in Room 408 – the administrative office of Soldotna Montessori Charter school, which shares a building with Soldotna Elementary. The two schools serve a combined total of more than 400 students in kindergarten through sixth grade, served by roughly three dozen teachers.
“The garbage can was on fire, so I hit that and it went out, and then I heard a sound in the ceiling and it was making an arcing sound,” he said. “Like a buzzing sound, like, BZZZZ. And then there were chunks of the grate that was kind of filling that space on fire, and it was dripping plastic down on the table.”
Stevenson says he used a fire extinguisher from the hallway to spray into the ceiling, where the fire had burned through the tile. He says the fire reignited multiple times after he used the extinguisher. After firefighters arrived, they were able to cut the power.
“The fire department pulled the fixture out and then eventually cut the wires,” he said. “And then our electrician came in, pulled the wires out, sealed out the box, and then we just ventilated the smoke.”
The cause was a shorted vent fan over a copy machine. Kevin Lyon is the district’s director of planning and operations. He says he was at the school cleaning up with custodial staff until about midnight. They sealed the area off and vented the air outside throughout the night.
Central Emergency Services’ Deputy Chief Dan Grimes responded to the fire. He said Friday firefighters were quickly able to put the fire out and had the scene cleared in less than two hours.
Grimes said nothing obviously indicated what caused the vent fan to fail, which he said is unusual but not unheard of. The incident is being investigated by a fire marshal.
In a social media post shared yesterday, the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District said it was working with the Kenai Peninsula Borough’s maintenance department and Central Emergency Services to assess the situation. That included testing the school’s air quality to ensure it was safe for students and staff to return to school Friday morning.
The fire was adjacent to Soldotna Montessori Principal John DeVolld’s office. He says he came in after the fire to survey the damage and expected to spend most of Friday cleaning up.
“A lot of cleanup happened before we started school,” he said. Came in this morning. I was quite surprised that, ‘Hey, things look good, and we're good to operate again.”
Now that cleanup work is underway, Lyon – the planning and operations director – says he’ll work with the borough to file an insurance claim. In the meantime, he says maintenance staff are bringing in new ceiling tiles and technicians are reviewing the other machines in the room for damages.
Under a school maintenance bond approved by voters in 2022, Soldotna Montessori Charter School is slated to be relocated to the currently vacant Soldotna Prep School. Inflationary impacts on costs have stalled work on some of those projects.
