Falling Wood Injures 8 at High School

An emergency drill at Granada Hills High School ended Tuesday morning with a real--if relatively minor--emergency, when six students and two teachers were struck by boards that fell from the roof of a building.

The injured were taken by ambulance to area hospitals. They suffered minor to moderate wounds that ranged from scraped knees to a cut scalp, administrators and witnesses said.

All the injured--six male students, a male teacher and a female teacher’s aide--had been treated and released by late afternoon.

The incident occurred about 11:40 a.m. during a drill designed to teach students what to do in case of an earthquake or other disaster.

As the 3,400 students left their classrooms and marched toward a nearby athletic field, a stack of 2-by-10-inch boards, between 15 and 20 feet long, tumbled from the roof of a low-slung classroom building.

Workers are beginning to replace the roof on much of the school, thanks to funds from Proposition BB, the $2.4-million bond fund approved by voters in April, Principal Kathleen Rattay said.

“I heard all this rumbling and I turned around and saw this one boy fall,” Samantha Smith, a 16-year-old sophomore, said after the accident. “Then a teacher got hit, and she started moaning.”

“The boards came right down on them,” said Juan Carlos Bonilla, 17, a senior who was just behind the group that was knocked to the ground.

No one lost consciousness, Rattay said. The school’s nurse had left the campus minutes before the accident, Rattay said.

“And I’m not a doctor, so we just called 911,” even though the injuries did not appear to be serious.

With television news helicopters hovering over the school and dramatic radio reports coming across the airwaves shortly after the accident, panicked parents left work to check on their children, and the phone in the main office rang repeatedly.

“Everyone is OK,” one receptionist told parent after parent. “Everyone is fine.”