After a bogus bomb threat forced the evacuation of the University of Texas at Austin campus Friday morning, school officials faced questions about whether they should have waited more than an hour before issuing the evacuation order.
The bomb threat was called in at 8:35 a.m. and UT officials issued the evacuation order at 9:50 a.m., just a few minutes before the caller said the bombs would go off in buildings around the campus. Thousands of students flowed off campus only to return after an all-clear was sounded by noon.At a press conference following the reopening of the campus, UT President William Powers said school officials waited more than an hour before issuing the order because they were carefully evaluating the threat. UT has about 24,000 faculty and staff and more than 50,000 students."It got to the point where we thought the prudent thing to do was to clear all buildings," Powers said. In making the order to reopen the campus, Powers said he was "extremely confident the campus is safe."Before the campus was reopened, the bomb scare brought tension and uncertainty to the bustling UT campus as some students were already in class and others were waiting for others to start. Students both criticized and praised how the university handled the situation.Freshman Grant Jones, 18, of Austin said he heard the sirens going off while he was in his dorm room getting ready for class but initially thought it was part of the monthly alarm testing they have on campus. Once he found out it was legitimate, he walked away from campus.Jones said he was troubled by the evacuation call coming so close to the 10 a.m. deadline."I just found the emergency procedure fairly disorganized," Jones said. "There didn't seem to be much of a protocol. It was just a lot of kids standing around. ... There are a lot of factors the students don't know about. It seemed a little lacking, I guess."Junior Kelsey Brooks, 20, who was studying for a finance test, was oblivious to the evacuation order as she walked into her class. Brooks said students stood outside buildings assuming it was a drill but she left campus almost immediately. She praised school officials' handling of the threat."I do think it's necessary to check out if it's legitimate," Brooks said. "I'm sure they took every precaution."Other threatsUT wasn't alone in receiving threats on Friday.North Dakota State University also evacuated its Fargo campus because of a similar bomb threat and Valparaiso University in Indiana also had unspecified threats that Valparaiso officials at that school said were "substantially different" from the threats at the other two schools.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."Yet another evacuation order for much-smaller Hiram College in northeast Ohio was issued hours later but lifted Friday night after a sweep found nothing suspicious.Alison Kiss, executive director for the Clery Center for Security on Campus in Pennsylvania, said that under federal law campuses must issue timely warnings about serious or ongoing threats. Bomb threats -- while often proving false -- must be taken seriously, she said."Campuses, upon confirmation of an immediate threat, have to issue a warning," she said, adding that emergency and security experts on campuses must be allowed to assess the threat and use their discretion. Many times, campuses err on the side of caution, she said.After the Virginia Tech massacre, and in the post-9-11 era, colleges try to respond quickly and issue alerts on several platforms from social media to e-mails to texts. Campuses have an emergency policy in place and test how they would react to an attack, weather emergency or active shooter."That's one of the lessons learned post-Virginia Tech," she said.Students also need to know how seriously a bomb threat is treated and that if they know of someone planning such a hoax to speak up, she said.UT System Board Regents Chairman Gene Powell praised how school officials handled the situation Friday."President Bill Powers, his staff and the UT and Austin police forces responded quickly and appropriately to ensure the safety and protection of everyone on campus," Powell said in a statement.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.Troubled pastIt was second time in recent years that UT students have been involved in a mass evacuation.On Sept. 28, 2010, a gunman opened fire inside the university library and killed himself. No one else was injured.And UT was the site of one of the first modern mass shooting when Charles Whitman opened fire from the Tower on campus and killed 16 and injured 31 others."They take it very seriously here," Brooks said. "We drill all the time so we're used to it."In their initial messages about the threat, UT officials said the caller was "a male with a Middle Eastern accent claiming to have placed bombs all over campus and that "he was with al Qaeda and these bombs would go off in 90 minutes."UT faculty member Snehal Shingavi, an assistant professor of English, worried that some would take the rumors as fact and Muslim or Middle Eastern students would become targets. Shingavi said that he is not Muslim, but that he wanted the student community to feel safe."The narrative gets ahead of the fact," he said. "That narrative, once released, becomes much harder to dispel."The event and ensuing rumors won't go away quickly."We will be talking about terrorism on college campuses all next week," he said.This report contains material from The Associated Press.Bill Hanna, 817-390-7698Twitter: @fwhannaDiane Smith, 817-390-7675Twitter:@dianeasmith1Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
