Shop equipment catches fire at Yreka Union High School

YREKA, Calif. – A small fire broke out on Yreka Union High School’s campus Friday.

The school said the fire was confined to the dust collection system in the school’s woodshop and the fire was reportedly handled “quickly and appropriately” by everyone involved.

YUHS said students were quickly evacuated and no students were in danger.

“As to emergency procedures and contact,” YUHS said in a statement on Facebook. “We are notifying parents and the community as quickly as is feasible. Our first and foremost responsibility is the safety of our students and to do that requires our accounting for and managing over 600 individual students. We realize parents want to know if their student is safe. However, cell phone calls and other contact actually endangers our ability to protect students. We cannot have those outside of the situation potentially adding wrong or misleading information into the student population while we are in the middle of a situation. Besides making our safe control of the situation more difficult, outside instructions could potentially lead a student back into danger; thus our directions to students to stay off their cell phones. As soon as we assure students are safe and the situation is secure we communicate with parents and release students to make contact. Thank you for your understanding, and fortunately, our plans, preparations and procedures made this a relatively simple situation.:

According to YUHS, the cause wasn’t related to facilities or maintenance of the equipment.