Students at the Bungay School were dismissed at 10 a.m. due to a heating oil spill outside the school.
An employee from Santa Energy was filling an underground tank behind the school when fuel began to spill from the top of the tank. The employee is believed to have added too much oil to the tank, fire officials said.
Firefighters estimate about 100 gallons spilled. Heating oil was seen in the rear parking lot, stretching toward an entrance to the building.
Officials said the fuel did not enter the building.
However, heating oil has a strong odor. Students were first moved into a cafeteria. Officials then made the decision to send students home due to the increasingly strong odor and the amount of time the clean up is expected to take.
“We didn’t want people and kids to get sick. We’re being proactive,” Fire Marshal Paul Wetowitz said.
Bungay School, an elementary school at 35 Bungay Road, has about 400 students.
A clean-up crew has been called in to do the clean up. The state Department of Environmental Protection is on the scene and supervising.
There are a lot of homes in the area with well water, but DEP spokesman Dennis Schain said the department does not believe those wells are in danger of contamination.
“It seems like it was contained to the pavement and quickly addressed, so there shouldn’t be any concern for any nearby drinking water wells,” Schain said. “We need to assess if there’s a chance some of the fuel could have escaped into groundwater.”
