‘God puts you in places’: Leeds teacher calls 911 after school is struck by lightning, catches fire
By Ayron Lewallen
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LEEDS, Ala. (WVTM) — Leeds City Schools said it’s going to take several weeks to get one school back on track. A section of the Leeds Primary School caught fire over the weekend. School system staff believe the fire was caused by a lightning strike.
There’s a lot of work that needs to be done before the school is ready for students to start school in August, and it’s hard to tell exactly what needs to be done because crews are still looking at the damage.
“We’ve got to think about the HVAC,” Mary Beth Lochridge with Leeds City Schools said. “We’ve got to think about the intercom system. We’ve got to think about Wi-Fi. There’s so many things that we just keep—and then it happened in the roof, but it impacted everything underneath. We’ve got to think about in each individual room and what is it that’s needed.”
Johannah Hudson said she was in the building when it was struck by fire. As she was leaving after preparing for the school system’s literacy camp. She was the only one in the building at the time and called 911. She told WVTM 13 the teachers have gotten an overwhelming amount of support from the community, especially with help hosting a literacy camp for students that started on Monday.
“I had many teachers from here at the elementary school texting me asking me, ‘What do you need? I got anything and everything you need to teach,’” Hudson said. “There’s a lot of things that we were going to need. We were blessed yesterday to be able to get some of our stuff and get the essentials here to this school, and it took a team of us about four or five of us. We made a couple of trips and got everything that we needed. The elementary school has been fantastic to provide us with a classroom and a space to teach our kids, any kind of materials we wanted, copies, things like that.”
Lochridge said four different fire departments came to help put the fire out and spent nearly six hours battling the flames.
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