Fire causes $100,000 damage to St. Joseph’s Academy
Firefighters believe an electrical malfunction in a meeting room sparked a Saturday afternoon fire at St. Joseph’s Academy on Broussard Street, a Baton Rouge Fire Department spokesman said.
Firefighters arrived at the school, 3015 Broussard St., at 1:08 p.m. and began investigating buildings throughout the campus, Robert Combs said in a news release.
Firefighters later received a call that pointed them to the meeting room, Combs said. The fire was then located and quickly extinguished, he said.
Fire damage was contained to the meeting room, but the rest of the structure sustained moderate smoke and heat damage, Combs said.
The fire caused $100,000 in damage to the school building involved, Combs said.
No one was in the building at the time of the fire, and no one was injured, Combs said.
St. Joseph’s spokeswoman Mindy Averitt said class schedules will not be affected by the fire, aside from possibly moving theology classes that are normally held in the damaged building to other classrooms on campus.
“We’ll have a better feel for that after the cleanup crews are in there and can do what work they can do and then assess the situation,” she said.
The fire ignited in a small meeting room inside a building that houses administrative and business offices, Averitt said.
Averitt said administrators are confident the electrical wiring in the building and around the rest of the school remains in working order despite the fire.
“This seems to be kind of an anomaly,” she said. “The Fire Department is telling us that it seems to have been an electrical thing in (just) that room.”