When a school burns down

No one knows what happens next. Granite School District needs to deal with declining enrollments in its east-side schools, but this isn't the ideal way to do it — not with a disastrous fire that destroys one of the district's top-performing schools.

The six-alarm fire that swept through Wasatch Junior High on Monday could have been so much worse. Because the fire was believed to have been accidental, not arson, it could have happened at any time — including during a school day when students were seated at their desks. Officials said they are certain those students would have been evacuated safely, but it was nice not to have to rely on everything going right with an orderly evacuation, or to raise concerns, even for a moment, among anxious parents.

But that doesn't ease the pain among those who were counting on resuming classes in the 46-year-old school next month. For students, schools become worlds unto themselves — microcosmic civilizations. Sub-cultural groups are formed. Sports teams compete. Orchestras and choirs perform. Student governments are elected. Young people derive a great deal of self-esteem from their interactions with these groups and with teachers. They develop a sense of pride in their school and develop rivalries with other schools.

For the students at Wasatch Junior High, that world now is in ashes, and students face the prospect of assimilating into a rival school for the remainder of their junior high years. That won't be easy.

A lot of questions have emerged since the fire. Most of them, however, can be answered with two words: age and money. The school was built before codes required sprinklers and fire walls. A simple sprinkling system probably would have doused the blaze before it had a chance to spread. But to install sprinklers would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and parents probably would have questioned why the district didn't use the money instead to install an air-conditioner. In the Granite District, money is tight.

Firefighters complained at the scene about a lack of water pressure. But those complaints probably could be answered with the same two words, as well. The neighborhood is fitted with 6-inch water mains. The new code requires 8-inch mains. While the 6-inch mains are big enough to send the required 1,500 gallons per minute through a fire hydrant, that flow diminished substantially when several hydrants were used at once. And the hydrants themselves had openings that were older and smaller than in new ones.

The water mains and hydrants would have been large enough to handle a residential fire, officials said, but the six-alarm blaze was overwhelming.