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A fire marshal lays down the law at the high school in Morgan: "Get the building up to fire codes by next Thursday or else."
Deputy State Fire Marshal Steve Higley doesn't expect the Morgan High School will be ordered to close because the fire code violations aren't that serious. But he's clearly frustrated by months of missed deadlines and a trail of false alarms that sometimes went off three times a day.
Technically what he did was refuse to extend, again, "conditional use" approval. For almost a year, that's allowed students to temporarily use areas that don't meet fire codes. Practically what he did was turn up the heat on school officials and contractors.
At Morgan High School a new addition has been in use by ceramics students since January. Last spring a pottery kiln overheated and set off sprinklers. Higley says that issue has been resolved. But several others have not. Higley says, "If they were life-threatening situations, we wouldn't be holding school."
But they are safety issues: an exit sign that sometimes won't light up, an emergency exit with a bad threshold that could trip people in an evacuation, an improperly ventilated paint sprayer. The biggest bugaboo has been months of false fire alarms, often enough, the superintendent says, to interfere with education.
Morgan County School District Superintendent Ron Wolff says, ‘It was frequent, and it was bad." He says bogus alarms on occasion forced evacuations three times in one day. Higley says, "They were actually having people say, ‘We don't need to leave.' And that causes some concern to the [Utah] State Fire Marshals Office."
The fire marshal believes that problem has been fixed, but contractors haven't provided evidence of certified testing. "It's been a little bit frustrating because things were either dropped, there was promises that hadn't been kept or deadlines that haven't been met," Higley says.
Wolff explains, "The contractor's tried to do his best, but we've got to wrap this up."
By refusing to grant another extension to the conditional use permit, he got everyone's attention, and now they're promising to get everything done by next Thursday.
Wolff says, "I'm pretty sure our subcontractors and our construction manager will get the job done."
"If they don't, then the state fire marshal will make a decision on which action to take," says Higley.
The superintendent says the reason they've had so much trouble is they've had to hold classes during a complex construction process, building the new addition and remodeling old sections. In fact, some of the false alarms were actually triggered by construction dust.
E-mail: hollenhorst@ksl.com
