Bomb threats prompt evacuations at 3 campuses

JIM VERTUNO

Asso­ci­ated Press

AUSTIN, Texas — Thou­sands of peo­ple streamed off three col­lege cam­puses Fri­day after bomb threats prompted offi­cials to issue evac­u­a­tion orders for schools in Texas, North Dakota and Ohio.

The cam­puses of the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin and North Dakota State Uni­ver­sity in Fargo had been deemed safe by early after­noon, and author­i­ties were work­ing to deter­mine whether those threats were related. A third evac­u­a­tion order for much-smaller Hiram Col­lege in north­east Ohio was issued hours later and remained in effect Fri­day evening.

Hiram spokesman Tom Ford said the school had received an emailed bomb threat that it was tak­ing seri­ously. Crews with bomb-sniffing dogs were check­ing all build­ings on the cam­pus about 35 miles south­east of Cleve­land where about 1,300 stu­dents are enrolled, he said.

The threats on the much-larger cam­puses in Texas and North Dakota ended as false alarms after tens of thou­sands of peo­ple fol­lowed urgently worded evac­u­a­tion orders, one of which some wor­ried didn’t come fast enough.

Both of those cam­puses emp­tied at quick but orderly paces Fri­day morn­ing, though stu­dents acknowl­edged an air of con­fu­sion about what was going on. The threats com­ing as vio­lent protests out­side U.S. embassies in the Mid­dle East also stirred ner­vous ten­sion among some stu­dents, and Texas offi­cials acknowl­edged global events were taken into account.

The first threat came around 8:35 a.m. to the Uni­ver­sity of Texas from a man claim­ing to belong to al-Qaida, offi­cials said. The caller claimed bombs placed through­out cam­pus would go off in 90 min­utes, but admin­is­tra­tors waited more than an hour before blar­ing sirens on the cam­pus of 50,000 stu­dents and telling them to imme­di­ately “get as far away as pos­si­ble” in emer­gency text messages.

Author­i­ties said they started search­ing build­ings for explo­sives before the alert was issued. UT Pres­i­dent Bill Pow­ers defended the deci­sion not to evac­u­ate sooner.

“It’s easy to make a phone call … the first thing we needed to do was eval­u­ate,” Pow­ers said. “If the threat had been for some­thing to go off in five min­utes, then you don’t have the time to eval­u­ate, you just have to pull the switch.”

Not every­one agreed.

“What took so long?” stu­dent Ricardo Nunez said. “It should have been more immediate.”

North Dakota State Uni­ver­sity Pres­i­dent Dean Bres­ciani said about 20,000 peo­ple left the Fargo school’s cam­puses as part of an evac­u­a­tion “that largely took place in a mat­ter of min­utes.” FBI spokesman Kyle Loven said NDSU received a call about 9:45 a.m. that included a “threat of an explo­sive device.”

Police and school offi­cials said the evac­u­a­tion was as orga­nized as could be expected, with one cam­pus employee describ­ing peo­ple as “being North Dakota nice” while dri­ving away.

“Nobody was pan­icked and nobody was try­ing to speed or run over any­body,” said Juleen Berg, who works at the NDSU heat­ing plant. “Every­body was wait­ing their turn.”

Grad­u­ate stu­dent Lee Kiedrowski of Dick­in­son, N.D., said he was walk­ing on the NDSU cam­pus when he got a text mes­sage telling him to evac­u­ate within 15 minutes.

“The panic but­ton wasn’t trig­gered quite imme­di­ately,” Kiedrowski said. “But there was def­i­nitely the thought that we live in a dif­fer­ent world now, and with every­thing that’s going on with the riots at the U.S. embassies in the Mid­dle East, your brain just starts mov­ing. You never really know what’s going on.”

The UT pres­i­dent acknowl­edged offi­cials in Texas also con­sid­ered the cur­rent polit­i­cal climate.

“Cer­tainly the global sit­u­a­tion would be part of what we look at when we eval­u­ate any threat,” Pow­ers said.

Sirens wailed on the Austin cam­pus and cell­phones pinged with text mes­sages when the ini­tial alert when out. Stu­dents described more con­fu­sion than panic as they exited the sprawl­ing cam­pus, where police blocked off all roads head­ing in as lines of cars sat in grid­lock try­ing to get out.

The evac­u­a­tion also cre­ated logis­ti­cal con­cerns for the 14th-ranked Texas Long­horns foot­ball team. Inside a police sta­tion across from the foot­ball sta­dium, exec­u­tive senior asso­ciate ath­let­ics direc­tor Ed Goble asked about get­ting the ath­let­ics com­plex build­ing cleared because the team had to leave for a Sat­ur­day game at the Uni­ver­sity of Mis­sis­sippi. The team’s locker room is inside the building.

Goble later said he wasn’t ask­ing that the team be made a pri­or­ity. Shortly after 11 a.m., while the rest of cam­pus remained almost deserted, Goble said police had given play­ers per­mis­sion to go into the ath­letic com­plex to pack for the game.

“All build­ing man­agers are noti­fied at the same time and all are expected to move as rapidly as pos­si­ble,” said Gary Suss­wein, spokesman for the UT president’s office, not­ing there was no pri­or­i­ties list for what build­ings were to be cleared first.

With rain falling, stu­dents stood under awnings and over­hangs and inun­dated nearby off-campus restau­rants and cof­fee shops as they waited for updates.

Abby John­ston, a pro­duc­tion and spe­cial edi­tions coor­di­na­tor for Texas Stu­dent Media, said she received the first text mes­sage from the uni­ver­sity while think­ing about what she would pub­lish in the next day’s paper. Then the sirens blared.

“We do the siren test once a month and so at first peo­ple thought maybe it was just a test, and then we started to tell every­body, ‘No actu­ally we have to get out of here pretty imme­di­ately,’” said John­ston, 22. “There was def­i­nitely a lit­tle bit of ner­vous tension.”

Tania Lara, a grad­u­ate stu­dent at the Lyn­don B. John­son School of Pub­lic Affairs, said she was at work inside a cen­tral cam­pus aca­d­e­mic build­ing when she got a text mes­sage to get as far away was possible.

“It was calm but nobody knew what was going on,” she said, describ­ing a crush of stu­dents head­ing for the exits. “No one was yelling ‘get out of here’ or any­thing like that.”

Also Fri­day, Val­paraiso Uni­ver­sity in Indi­ana increased secu­rity and posted a warn­ing to stu­dents on its web­site after a vague threat was dis­cov­ered scrawled in graf­fiti. The school said the threat claimed “dan­ger­ous and crim­i­nal activ­ity” would occur dur­ing the university’s daily chapel break.

The FBI and local author­i­ties searched the cam­pus but found noth­ing sus­pi­cious and uni­ver­sity spokes­woman Nicole Niemi said classes and other reg­u­lar activ­i­ties would go on.

Posted by AP News on Sep 14 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.