Johansen races to ready portable classrooms while fire-scarred building restored

Johansen High School will open without its burned B building, shifting math classes to a hastily assembled corridor of portable classrooms dubbed the E wing – E for emergency, said Principal Nathan Schar.

The 48,000-square-foot B building housed math and science classes and four computer rooms, one of which went up in flames June 18.

An electrical problem caused the fire, which will cost at least $9 million – possibly up to $11 million – before students can return to B building classes, said John Liukkonen, head of maintenance and operations for Modesto City Schools.

Having students back in the building by spring semester is the goal, Liukkonen said.

In the meantime, the first day of school is Monday, with crews and teachers working this weekend to get the rented portable classrooms ready for students.

On Thursday, workers were attaching electric wiring to three new power poles erected to serve the new portables, which sit on a portion of the school’s back parking lot just east of its gymnasium. The temporary quarters will have intercom service and wireless Internet. Bathrooms sit just around the corner in the gym lobby.

A new walkway meeting Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines got a final coat of paint Thursday, with teachers expected to be allowed into their new digs Friday and Saturday, Schar said.

Electronics, including teacher computers, all were destroyed, he said. Most teachers stored files on the district servers and will be able to pick up where they left off. “But some teachers had a total loss of math worksheets for the last 20 years,” Schar said.

Salvageable furniture and equipment in all the B building rooms got a deep cleaning. Small items fill boxes stuffed in storage areas and a warehouse across town.

Across campus, a scramble was on Thursday to find the right keys to open the lightly used portables already housed on campus. Four classes will squeeze in there. An old shop building will serve as a science lab that classes will have to share, Schar said.

The principal had a 10 a.m. meeting with the fire marshal and insurance adjusters. Later on, a school film crew would shoot a welcome-back video explaining all the changes. Students who attended the high school roundup or freshman orientation have heard the drill already, Schar said.

The fire began around 9 a.m. while two other computer rooms on the second floor were being used by about 60 summer school students, Schar said Thursday.

Instructors, concerned by sputtering electrical service even before they could spot the problem, were evacuating students when smoke and heat alarms went off.

Firefighters from Modesto, Stanislaus Consolidated and Ceres fire districts contained the blaze within the single room, despite the smoldering fire’s head start and the lack of a sprinkler system in the building.

Modern schools must have a fire-suppression sprinkler system, but designs for the Johansen campus, which opened in 1992, conform to 1988 fire codes, Liukkonen said. The school has sprinklers only in the stage area of its theater, where tall curtains called for them, he said, adding it would be prohibitively expensive to retrofit the building with such a system now.

Sprinklers would not have stopped sparking electrical wires, but they might have cooled smoking computer casings.

“It was the heat. It smoldered for so long, it melted all that plastic,” Liukkonen said. The toxic mix of vaporized chemicals became billowing black smoke so thick it stuck to every permeable surface, including soundproofing on the walls.

Smoke caused the bulk of the damage. It poured into rooms through the building’s air-conditioning system, which was chugging away in anticipation of a warm summer day.

The building’s ventilation system went in first when it was built, with all the wiring and other systems put on top of it, Liukkonen said. That meant everything from false ceilings to wiring had to be pulled out in order to replace the putrid ducts.

“The reason it’s taking so long is we’re having to gut everything,” he said.

But the structure is sound, and on the building’s exterior, Johansen’s iconic thin-brick cladding sits cool and steadfast, unfazed by all the commotion within. On Thursday, only mesh fencing surrounding the ground floor and ventilation tubes hanging from the upper story suggested algebra assignments will not be doled out in B building this semester.

Before students file back in, the building will have new wiring and an upgraded fire alarm system. New technology will fill the computer lab and the yearbook classroom. Sturdy science tables will return clean as a whistle. Walls, ceilings and floor coverings will all be brand-new.

Energy-efficient LED fixtures will light the center of interior hallways instead of the old corner sconces. Science classrooms will have polished concrete floors instead of carpet. The old tilt mirrors on the ceiling, there to give students a view of experiments, will be replaced by 80-inch screens on the wall.

“We’re making it nicer,” Schar said. “Structurally it will be the same, but we’re doing some updates.”

This story was originally published August 7, 2015 at 12:00 PM with the headline "Johansen races to ready portable classrooms while fire-scarred building restored."