The fire alarms sounded through the hallways, causing every student to rush to the nearest exit. This time it was not a prank or a case of burnt cookies. A phone had caught flame.

On Wednesday March 15^th, roughly 25 to 30 minutes before the end of first period senior Jossalin Sanchez discovered a smoking phone in her backpack that led administrators to call the fire department to put out the fire. She was in Pharmaceutical Technology class with HST teacher Annette Chinske.

“When it happened, I was finishing up one of my sketches and applying for a Pharm Tech job at CVS,” Sanchez said. “At first I smelled something weird, so I checked my bag. There was white smoke coming from the [broken] phone my friend had given me for a still life sculpture that I was planning.”

After Sanchez noticed the back half of the rose gold iPhone 6s was smoking, she pulled the apparatus out and dropped it, as smoke began to rise from the phone. The other seniors crowded around the spectacle, watching the streams of graying smoke cloud into the air.

“We saw and smelled the smoke,” Chinske said. “I was worried about everyone’s safety, so I just got everybody out. I really didn’t want the sprinklers to go off.”

Nurse Chinske has worked at NG since 2001, teaching clinical and other HST courses, like Pharm Tech, to a wide range of students.

“There was this one time that a bird flew in through the window and started pooping on the students’ heads,” Chinske said.

When the fire department arrived they were perplexed to find that an iPhone was the cause of so much chaos.

“I was really surprised [when] the fire department told me they had never seen anything like this,” Chinske said.

Even though Sanchez’s art project was set back by the phone fiasco, she was able to react to the situation before it got worse.

“I always try to pay attention to my surroundings, so I’m just glad I caught it in time,” Sanchez said.