A huge emergency cordon has been erected outside a school as fire services investigate a “strong smell of gas”. Belvedere Academy school in Liverpool has been “evacuated”, but “all children are safe”, school bosses say.
The school in Belvedere Road is at the centre of a road closure as Merseyside Fire and Rescue, along with police scramble to the scene. It comes after people reportedly began to smell gas this morning.
The school issued an update, as reported by the Liverpool Echo. It said: “All pupils are being well looked after. We are currently awaiting further information from Cadent.
“Please do not try to come to school as there are road closures in place. We will send a further update once we have more information.”
Dale Martin, Merseyside Customer Operations Area Manager at Cadent, told the Echo: “We have had a larger than usual number of calls today in the South Liverpool area, about a smell that people are concerned is natural gas.
“We investigate each one and, as yet, have not found any evidence of an issue on the gas network that could have caused this. One of the calls was for us to attend The Belvedere Academy and our engineers are there now, carrying out checks.
“We do gets incidents like this from time to time. In the past, we have traced it to things like factory discharges, aviation fuel, smells from docks activity, and many other reasons.
“Our concern in incidents like this is that, in amongst the smells that are not gas, there may be an isolated and unrelated real gas leak.”
