The renovated laboratory was hailed as state of the art. One teacher even said it would be a “crown jewel” of the campus shared by several high schools in Marble Hill, its unveiling so eagerly anticipated that paper had been put up over windows to keep students from peeking inside, one mother said.
“This lab was like a new Mercedes,” said Danny Steiner, a teacher at Bronx Theatre High School, one of the schools that share space once occupied solely by John F. Kennedy High School.
On Thursday, a construction crew spent hours installing a gas line for the lab when one of the workers lit a Bunsen burner to determine whether it was working, officials said.
The worker did not know the room had filled with gas fumes, officials said, and when he struck a match, it set off a blast that destroyed the lab and damaged the building badly enough that students would not be able to return to the campus when the school year begins on Sept. 9.
The damage forced school officials to find new places to house the 3,000 students who attend the seven separate schools on the campus in Marble Hill, a section of Manhattan, New York, that is on the mainland, bordering the Bronx. It is unclear how long they are to be displaced.
The explosion blew out the walls of the sixth-floor lab and shot debris up to 60m away.
“This was quite a scene of destruction,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said in an interview with the 1010 WINS radio station on Friday. “I saw it last night with my own eyes.”
Three workers who were severely injured in the explosion were being treated in a burn unit at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, officials said. De Blasio on Friday said that one of the three was in critical condition and that the others were in serious condition; however, a spokeswoman for the hospital said that the men and their families had asked that the hospital release no further information.
The US Department of Education said that the construction was part of a US$7 million project to renovate lab space that the schools share. The city last month issued a permit for the installation of water, sanitation and gas connections to the school’s sixth floor and to add fume hoods, among other repairs, according to a city official who spoke anonymously because the investigation was continuing.
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