Tokyo school blaze: Teacher had brought own heater to school before fire
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A fire broke out at an elementary school in Tokyo on June 19, injuring at least one person, but all children and staff were evacuated safely.
PHOTO: AFP
- A teacher brought her own electric heater and air circulator to a Tokyo elementary school storage room, where the fire started.
- The fire forced the teacher and 24 students to escape through windows and onto a narrow ledge. 11 people were injured.
- The school building was heavily damaged, and students from third grade up will attend other local schools starting early July.
AI generated
TOKYO – The head of a Tokyo public elementary school that was severely damaged in a fire in June said on July 2 that a teacher had placed her own electric heater and air circulator in the storage room where the fire is thought to have originated.
The teacher had routinely dried items there after using the washing machine in the home economics room, and was drying articles of her own clothing at the time of the fire, principal Masahiro Takakusaki said.
The fire broke out in the fourth-floor storage room of Takinogawa Dai-san Elementary School on June 19. At the time, the teacher and 24 fifth-graders of the municipally run school in Tokyo’s Kita Ward were in the adjacent music room.
To escape the fire, the teacher and students climbed through the windows and onto a narrow ledge only 76cm wide. Among the 11 people who were injured, one pupil and the teacher sustained broken bones after falling to the rooftop of a lower-level floor.
The police said fibre fragments were found on the heater and that power was being supplied to the device at the time of the fire.
The teacher, who is in her 40s, has told the police that she was drying laundry using the air circulator. The police are looking into the case as an accidental fire.
Takakusaki said it was “improper to keep or wash private belongings” in the workplace.
The building was damaged so extensively that the municipal government is arranging for pupils from third grade and above to attend other schools in the area beginning early July. KYODO NEWS
