Saturday, November 15, 2008

LLHS campus searched after natural gas odor reported on Thursday

Los Lunas About 26 Los Lunas High School students complained of nausea and headaches Thursday morning after the odor of natural gas was reported on the campus. About 15 of them went home with their parents.

Firefighters, PNM workers and members the district's maintenance crew searched the school but were unable to detect the source of the odor, said Desi Garcia, the school district's director of security.

"It quickly went away," he said. "They were not able to locate or isolate any source it might have initiated from."

Students were checked out in the nurse's office, Garcia said, but no one was transported to a hospital.

It wasn't the first time that such an odor had been reported on campus. "There was a gas leak about a block and a half from the school a month or so ago, and there was another gas leak a while back on the west side of the freeway," he said. "There's a lot of construction in the area, and it's really difficult to determine where it might have come from.

"It all came back with a clean bill of health."

Rochelle Chavez, the school district's public relations officer, said that the odor was detected in the E and F wings — the freshman prep academy — on the west side of the campus.

She said both students and teachers reported smelling natural gas.

No evacuation was ordered during the search.

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