As a powerful storm sweeps through San Francisco on February 20th, 2024, Galileo experiences various leaks throughout the facility, most notably the school cafeteria which is now closed off while repairs are being made.
At the start of lunch, while students were standing in line or just starting to eat their lunch, water suddenly started pouring down from the ceiling, and many of them pulled out their phones to capture this moment. “It came as a shock, everyone was screaming; I’ve never seen something like this happen before at Galileo. I thought the school was cooked, so I pulled out my phone to record,” said Junior Zaki Z. who was eating lunch in the cafeteria at the time of the flooding.
Shortly after, faculty were sent in to evacuate all the students as it looked like ceiling tiles were gonna fall on top of them. “I realized that if those ceiling tiles got soggy enough, then they would start falling, and so we started evacuating everyone from the cafeteria and sure enough, right after most people left, the tiles collapsed. I felt very lucky that I made the decision to evacuate the cafeteria so that no one got hurt.” said principal, Mr. Panjabi, who coordinated the evacuation.
The leaks in the cafeteria are believed to be a combination of a leak in the flashing seal and clogging of the drains. “The skylights above the cafeteria were sealed with flashing, which is a seal to make sure water doesn’t get through, my suspicion is that the seal was broken for a while and the sudden downpour caused the water to gush through. There are drains, but they were backed up.” said Mr. Panjabi.
Even though the flooding was a shock to the school, the administration was able to act quickly to get things under control. Mr. Panjabi said, “I spoke to the supervisor and texted one of the supervisors of buildings and grounds which is the district office that manages the buildings, and then within an hour we had plumbers and carpenters to assess the damage and custodians did an amazing job with getting all the water sucked up and pushed out of classrooms and the cafeteria. Now they’re working on repairs on the skylight within the cafeteria.”
Due to the damage, the cafeteria is temporarily only open on one side and seating is completely closed off. As a result, students are forced to enter and exit through one side of the building. Mr. Panjabi wants students to know that “work is ongoing”.
In addition to the damage in the cafeteria, there was also a flood in room 102 from the sink. As water kept gushing out from the sink, Mr. Keough, who teaches in this room, had to use two trash bins to stop the water from spilling out. But the water ultimately ended up flooding the hallway next to his room.
Mr. Keough said, “I guess when it rained really hard during lunch, it seemed like the plumbing got backed up and unfortunately came out of the sink of my classroom and it was like a waterfall coming down from the counter, so it flooded the room and flooded the hallway outside. I had students get recycling bins from other classrooms and called the front office to get the custodians to help.”
