Burrton schools district office damaged by quake

Aug. 16--Burrton School officials relocated high school classes to middle and elementary school classrooms Friday morning after Reno County's 4.2 magnitude earthquake appeared to have damaged several walls in the district's school building.

The students were allowed to return to their classrooms after lunch, however, after a structural engineer determined damage to the high school itself was only cosmetic.

The district's central office did suffer structural damage, said Superintendent Joan Simoneau, so they'll have to relocate those offices until the building can be repaired.

"I'm not a structural engineer, so I didn't know what I was looking at," Simoneau said. "When I saw the damage in the classroom, it concerned me, so we took the high school students out of that part of the building and moved them into other parts of the building."

The Burrton school is a K-12 building, with classrooms on different hallways.

The concern also prompted them to move lunch out of the building to the community building at City Hall.

Simoneau described the damaged as "buckling" to a wall in the FACS classroom.

She said the engineer, however, explained that it was only sheetrock attached to the exterior walls of the building that were damaged. The walls themselves "behaved as they were supposed to" and remained sound. The building was constructed in the 1970s, she said.

The damage to the central office, which is a 100-year-old building, involved floor joists pulling away from load-bearing walls.

"There were fresh splinters in the old wood, so it happened very recently," she said.

District maintenance workers will have to tear out some walls in the basement of the office building for the engineer to return and determine the full extent of the damage and how to repair it.

Simoneau had no estimate on the potential costs and noted the district does not have earthquake insurance.

"This is the stuff nightmares are made of," she said. "On Monday, I and my two gals will have to look for space, to dig out a niche for us to weather the storm."

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