LIVERMORE FALLS — Roughly 100 children were sent home Tuesday night when more than two dozen people became sick after dinnertime at Camp Good News.

State officials said 25 children and staff experienced nausea, vomiting and diarrhea 2 1/2 hours after eating dinner at the summer camp on Schoolhouse Pond.

There were approximately 100 campers and 80 staff at the camp at the time, according to a state official.

Once the illnesses became apparent, camp leaders began calling parents to pick up their children. The camp was closed immediately and had not been reopened as of Friday night, according to John A. Martins, director of public and employee communications at the Maine Department of Health and Human Services.

He said state licensing officials and epidemiologists were sent to Livermore Falls to examine the facility where violations were found in and around the camp.

“From a licensing perspective,” Martins said, “there were several violations, including equipment and food contact surfaces and utensils not being clean, food being served and re-served and food temperature. The pool chemistry was also outside of normal limits.”

The type of illness suffered by the campers and staff members remains unknown, Martins said. The camp is working with the health inspection program to determine when it will re-open, he said.

Maine Center for Disease Control infectious disease epidemiologists are in the process of interviewing camp staff, Martins said, to see if they can determine a likely cause for the outbreak.

At least one guardian was lauding the manner and speed with which camp leaders responded to the crisis. Beth Frechette of Mechanic Falls said she was called Tuesday night to come pick up her grandsons. One of them was sick, the other was not, Frechette said.

Camp staff stayed with the sick 8-year-old boy until Frechette arrived, she said, making sure he was cared for while waiting for his grandmother.

“They were very tender with him,” Frechette said.

Her grandson was nauseous for part of Tuesday night but the nausea soon passed.

“It was pretty much a 24-hour thing,” she said. “The next day, he felt fine.”

Camp Good News offers an overnight experience for boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 13 and teens ages 14 to 17. The camp offers a range of activities, including canoeing, archery, swimming, fishing and riflery and is part of the Child Evangelism Fellowship of Maine.

“It’s a very caring environment,” Frechette said, adding that her grandsons will likely go back to the camp next summer. “I would send them back there in a heartbeat. I don’t have any complaints about them at all.”

There was no answer when the camp was called Friday night.