Virginia teacher and firefighters feud over whether a python started schoolhouse fire

Authorities blamed Nanner for knocking over a heat fixture, but Brittany Jacobs contends it was trying to escape blaze

The snake didn’t start the fire. So says a Virginia science teacher who owns a python that was found outside its enclosure in a middle school classroom that caught fire recently.

Authorities, meanwhile, have publicly blamed the fire on the snake, named Nanner, alleging the python knocked over a heat fixture in her owner’s classroom, igniting a blaze that caused damage at Bedford county’s Forest middle school and killed a tortoise there.

But Nanner’s caretaker has vociferously come to her defense, with the educator arguing the python only got out trying to desperately escape a blaze that was not of the creature’s making.

The unusual controversy erupted after Forest middle’s fire alarm and sprinkler system was triggered at about 12.30am on 13 August. Local firefighters said they arrived to find the blaze had started in a second-floor classroom – where, after entering, they encountered an 8ft (2.4m) python on the loose amid flames and smoke.

Crews “secured the python into a temporary holding area” while they extinguished the blaze, which officials said resulted in damage from fire or water to several classrooms – and claimed the life of a tortoise.

“We were met with smoke – and the snake,” Ryan Owen, a firefighter-emergency medical technician who responded to the classroom blaze, later told the Virginia news outlet WZBJ .

Furthermore, the county’s chief fire marshal, Steven Whipple, declared to WZBJ that “the snake contributed to starting the fire” by knocking over a heat fixture.

“However,” Whipple said, “I don’t think there was any maliciousness involved on the snake’s side.”

Although officials said Forest middle school’s first day of classes on Wednesday would proceed as scheduled, word that a snake had caused a fire on campus generated a substantial amount of news coverage and social media commentary.

All of that ultimately prompted a woman identifying herself as the life science teacher who put Nanner in the classroom at the center of the case to weigh in with a lengthy social media post disputing the creature was responsible for sparking the blaze.

Brittany Jacobs wrote that “all light fixtures were secured to the appropriate places” in her classroom, where throughout her 18-year teaching career she has kept enclosed animals such as snakes, frogs, turtles, tortoises and hatched chicks for educational purposes.

The heat fixture next to the tortoise who perished was “clamped” to the side of its enclosure and placed high above the animal’s bedding “to not cause a fire due to overheating”, Jacobs wrote on 15 August. “It had been in the same place for the past [three] years and was something that could not easily be knocked over.”

And, from her assessment of the fire’s aftermath, there was no evidence that the tortoise enclosure’s heat fixture had been knocked over. The entire heat fixture where the fire started was completely gone, including its metal casing and socket, Jacobs said. All that was left was the fixture’s heat emitter.

Whatever might have ignited the fire in that fixture, Jacobs said, the blaze evidently burned so hot that the metal on Nanner’s tank “had been stretched”. And, to Jacobs, it seemed Nanner then “pushed on the [enclosure] screen so hard to get out that she bent the metal locks”.

“Her light fixture and the [three] other snake light fixtures on that counter were all in the places that they should have been in and were not disrupted” after Nanner became the first animal Jacobs could recall escaping an enclosure in her classroom, the teacher said.

Additionally, video from school hallway surveillance cameras established that the fire was visible through glass on Jacobs’ classroom door for 20 minutes before Nanner was then seen exiting.

Jacobs asserted that Nanner instinctually would have slithered toward the doorway because that was where the classroom was coolest during the fire.

“She left the room because it was so hot in there,” Jacobs said. “So hot that it melted the tank next to hers” – along with “literally” half of the teacher’s basketball-sized tortoise, Bowser.

Jacobs lastly maintained that firefighters first confronted Nanner outside her classroom doorway. She said they then used a water hose to blast Nanner from outside the doorway back into a corner of the room, where the python was positioned in a video that firefighters recorded and published on social media.

The teacher also wrote that Nanner’s face had “perfect circles of soot” matching her enclosure’s screen holes rather than those of the holding tank in which the fire department temporarily put the python.

That ostensibly implied Nanner was in her enclosure when the fire started.

Also, Jacobs wrote, bathing the soot off Nanner revealed something had made the python push so intensely against the enclosure screen to get out that she bruised her nose.

Jacobs said she had subsequently needed to take Nanner along with all of her other animals at the school home, leaving the educator to grieve that “many children will now not have the [learning] opportunities that many others have had”.

“I have overwhelming guilt that an exorbitant amount of money is going to have to be spent to fix all of these things [damaged], even though this was an accident and not [my], or anyone else’s, fault,” Jacobs continued.

Yet she said she spoke out about Nanner and the fire because “a lot of misinformation has been shared and a lot of things have been left out”.

The Guardian reached out to Whipple for comment on Jacobs’ post.

“I’m not here to point fingers, I’m not here to lay blame, I am not here to say anyone is not doing their job,” Jacobs’ post said. “I’m here to present some facts that will clear up many misconceptions that are out there right now.”