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Electrical fire at Thermal school causes $1 million in damages, shuts down 3 schools

Yesterday, Toro Canyon Middle School was the epicenter of chaos for several schools in the East Valley. An electrical room fire burned for two hours and prompted the evacuation of the school, but the ripples didn’t stop there.

The blaze caused a million dollars worth of damage to the Thermal “Megasite”; a high school, middle school, and elementary school are all together on one campus, and the fire caused major infrastructure damage for all three schools.

Hundreds of students were evacuated from the school.

“I just screamed and I looked at her and I told her ‘Is it fake or not?’,” said Anai Amaya, a 7th grader at Toro Canyon Middle School. “And then the teacher just told us to get in line and well we walked out and saw that it was real and fire was coming out.”

The costly damage forced all three schools, Toro Canyon Middle School, Las Palmitas Elementary School, and Desert Mirage High School to shut down for the remainder of the week, just as the school year was kicking off.

4,000 total students have been affected by the closures.

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