Shorty after 11pm on Sunday, December 10th there was a minor fire in one of the AOS classrooms in the 300 hallway. The fire was caused by an experiment conducted by the Academy of Science. The actual fire came from an electrical device that overheated. “[This tank was] bigger than a typical fish tank that started the fire. It’s the only thing that burned in the contents of this particular experiment,” Dr. Brewer said.

Under normal circumstances the fire should have been put out by the head sprinklers which are attached to the ceiling. While the sprinklers did go off, they weren’t able to put out the fire on their own. The firemen had to come into the building in order for the fire to be extinguished.

Luckily, no one was in the building when the fire started and no one was harmed. Students were able to attend school the next day and start on time, and only eight classrooms were not being used, so classes in those classrooms had alternate locations.

The classroom in which the fire took place, 306, suffered some smoke damage which will need to be repaired with new paint and new blinds which were damaged by the smoke. “It’s going to take this week to repair that room [306] and then it will be ready to go when school starts again in January,” Dr. Brewer said.

Water damage was what caused the majority of the damage to the building. Almost all of the classrooms on in the 300 hallway, both upstairs and downstairs, have damage. These classroom are almost fully repaired, and it should only take 12-15 hours to be fully repaired and ready for use. These classrooms need to be fully cleaned and many ceiling tiles need to be replaced. According to Dr. Brewer, 200 to 300 ceiling tiles need to be replaced. There is uncertainty about the damage in the computer labs in the L300 hallway.

LCPS is testing these computers in the labs, drying them out, and seeing if they still work. Dominion does not know how many have been damaged. “A computer is probably roughly about 1,000 dollars to replace. Let’s say we lost 25 of them that would be a big chunk of money, 25,000 dollars in total. That is a total guess and there might be none of them that are ruined, so it’s hard to say right now,” said Dr, Brewer.

At the moment the economic damage doesn’t seem to be all that bad, “These damages didn’t amount to much, maybe 10,000 to 15,000 dollars. In a 53 million dollar building that’s not very much,” said Dr. Brewer.

Surprisingly, Dr. Brewer heard the fire first through social media and only got a call from Loudoun County Public School dispatcher around about 12:30. This was the first time that Dominion had an actual fire. “I’m so grateful to Loudoun County Public Schools Facility Services for coming in to make sure we had a great day today [December 11th] and I’m so proud of our staff and students for being Truly Titan today in particular,” said Dr. Brewer.