What happened to bring down a major portion of the gymnasium roof at Jasper High School at the facility’s south end at about 5:15 Monday morning remains unclear.
But an entire community can breathe a sigh of relief that no one was hurt in a mishap that could have been catastrophic one day earlier or an hour later in a structure that opened in 1978.“Our gym is gone,” said retiring Jasper athletic director Denny Lewis. “My gut reaction is that it’s a total loss, although that’s yet to be determined. They’ll be back in there (today).
“But the most fortunate thing about this is, if this happens in the early morning hours on Saturday, we could’ve had 400 or 500 kids in there for their prom. There wasn’t one thing we lost that can’t be replaced.”
John Goebel, the school’s boys’ basketball coach, had his offices virtually destroyed, but he wasn’t concerned about that.
“Understand, it wasn’t just the hundreds of kids who could’ve been in there Saturday,” he said. “If this happens one hour later, the maintenance guys would’ve been in there right where the roof fell, breaking down all those tables and chairs.
“Two hours later, we’re in school.”
Lewis, who lives minutes away, was one of the first people on the scene besides the handful of people already in the school.
“I understand we had some walkers and one of our coaches (whom Lewis wouldn’t name) in the other end of the gym,” he said. “Then they heard the fire alarms and saw that the roof had collapsed.
“What happened was the roof collapse caused the fire alarm to go off and then that automatically goes to the fire department. They were already there by the time I arrived by 5:45.”
Goebel arrived about 15 minutes later.
“It looked like a bomb hit the building,” he said. “The basketball offices were right there and we lost almost all of our equipment. They let us in there for a few minutes and we were able to salvage some pictures and a few uniforms, but that was it.
“Then you could see the fire department, police and engineers were all pretty nervous about anybody being in there and we had to get out. The way I look at this is it gives you an appreciation of what people are going through when a tornado rips through their lives. At least this wasn’t our home.”
Lewis said pointing out any potential cause or path going forward would be mere speculation at this point.
“Right now it is safely chained off and under the guard of law enforcement,” he said. “We do not have school (today), but can’t yet speak for Wednesday. Engineers will also be in there (today) to assess the damage.
“You just can’t imagine anything like this happening. From an athletic standpoint it happened at a good time.
“But I’ll tell you this: We say ’it is what it is’ a lot around here and what this is is a mess.”
