As forest fires rage out of control near Boulder, Colo., for a third straight day, a school district spokesperson said that the emergency is not having a wide-scale impact on school transportation.
Eight people were missing and nearly 100 homes had been destroyed as the fires continued to burn over more than 7,000 acres, according to news reports. While reports also indicated some 3,000 people had been evacuated, a spokesman for the Boulder Valley School District said that number was closer to 1,000, including 568 of the total 29,000 students who attend school in the district.
Briggs Gamblin, BVSD’s director of communications and legislative policy, said that two small mountain schools remained closed on Wednesday afternoon due to power outages in the area. Those schools have little district transportation because most of the students live in town mere blocks from campus or are driven by parents. The few students who do require transportation, Gamblin added, rely on a district SUV to get to and from school.
The 568 students who had been evacuated to Boulder City also attend school in the area and normally rely on school bus transportation to get up and down the mountain, Gamblin said, so those students continued to attend class.
Meanwhile, up the hill in Nederland, both the local elementary and joint middle-high school had reopened after being closed earlier in the week. School buses were back in operation for students except in a couple of cases where the routes travel through the evacuation area.
Wire reports indicated the also fire claimed several school buses. However Gamblin confirmed that the school buses were surplus vehicles owned by a guest ranch in the area.
The fire apparently started when a work truck left a mountainous road and hit a propane tank.
A fire was also spreading out of control in Detroit. Calls to the Detroit Public Schools had yet to be returned at this writing.
