24 Capistrano Valley High Students Stricken by Gas

Twenty-four students and administrators at Capistrano Valley High School were hospitalized Friday with complaints of chest pains, dizziness and nausea after a mysterious gas prompted evacuation and closure of the campus.

Nine more were treated at the school and released, said Capt. Dan Young, of the Orange County Fire Department.

Young said the gas may have been the result of a prank, and that investigators were still interviewing students late Friday.

“It seemed early on that this was some type of prank,” Young said. “Unfortunately, it turned out to be much more than a prank.”

None of the injuries appeared to be life-threatening, authorities said. But several ambulances filled with paramedics and firefighters were dispatched to the scene to treat the injured, some of whom were vomiting, and take them to four area hospitals, firefighter David W. Boyd said.

Of the 24 people taken to hospitals, all were treated and released after several hours, hospital officials said.

“The doctors don’t have any information on what the agent was,” said Randy Middlebrook, a spokesman for South Coast Medical Center in Laguna Beach, where five female students were sent.

The Orange County Fire Department’s hazardous materials team also went to the campus in an attempt to identify and eliminate the unidentified gas.

“There will be a school investigation after the Fire Department is done with its investigation,” said Jacqueline Price, a spokeswoman for the Capistrano Unified School District. “There will be a follow-through on what they found.”

The gas, which Young said gave off a slight odor, was first noticed about noon, during lunchtime at the 2,400-student school at 26301 Via Escolar on the Mission Viejo-San Juan Capistrano border just off Interstate 5.

Most of the students were in the mall area or center of the circular campus when an administrator on an intercom told them to evacuate.

Some students said that Friday was Senior Prank Day, which prompted them to think the warning was a ruse.

“Everyone was wondering, ‘Was this a prank or was this for real,’ ” said senior Dana Rueseler, 18.

When the nauseating gas spread, senior Paul Carlin, 18, was waiting in the lunch line.

“I thought it was a stink bomb,” Carlin said. “But when I started breathing it in I knew it wasn’t. It was like throwing flour in the air and breathing it in, you had to cough, cough, cough to get it out.”

Jamie Minton, a 16-year-old sophomore, was also eating lunch in the mall when the students were told to leave the area.

“They just said, ‘Evacuate the campus, evacuate the campus,’ and kids came pouring out from everywhere,” Minton said. Students were told to check in with their fifth-period teachers and then, just before 2 p.m., classes were canceled for the long Memorial Day weekend, Minton said.

Young said there have been three similar incidents at the hilltop campus in the last 10 days. The latest was Thursday when some sort of gas was released in an open field, Young said. There were no reported injuries.

Tom Anthony, a district administrator at the scene and former principal of Capistrano Valley High School, said one of the school administrators first noticed “kind of a funny, dizzy feeling.”

“They couldn’t smell anything, but then several other people felt it,” Anthony said. “It kind of went all over the campus because all the rooms are connected by our air conditioning.”

Firefighter Rick Robinson said the hazardous materials team believed that someone could have put some kind of chemical near a ventilation unit.

“It could have been someone mixing chemicals or someone with some sort of gas bomb, but no one could smell it,” Robinson said. “We are trying to isolate the area and track it down.”

Times correspondent Lynda Natali contributed to this report.