So I went to work today, very briefly around 8:15 am, to pick up my iPad from a colleague and head off campus for a departmental retreat. About 20 minutes into the retreat, I get a text alerting me to immediately leave any building if on campus. Pretty soon we all had it, and started calling colleagues on campus to see what was up. About 20 minutes later, a local station reported that a “Middle Eastern-sounding man” had called in a bomb threat in a number of buildings across campus. Dude also claimed he was down with the Qaeda posse.
Pretty soon the Twitterverse exploded with pictures of students in front of buildings, rants, and wishes of goodwill (very nice). We got word that campus police were sweeping the buildings, and they actually reopened the buildings by noon. Classes were cancelled and apparently “all university events resumed by 5 pm,” which means not a damn thing happened work-wise, but I believe a concert took place this evening. Oh, and the football team were able to get their gear and head to Oxford, MS for the game tomorrow.
That was our day at work… anybody else deal with a bomb threat? Earlier in the week some guy was pulling fire alarms. I know North Dakota State had a similar hoax as well…
Not exactly what you were asking but I was trying to get across the U.T. campus during the last lockdown in 2010. Driving past barracaded streets with black helicopters flying over head was very surreal.
Am I the only person who read the thread title and instantly imagined a zany buddy comedy where Osama and his friends are always trying to get some, while struggling to pass their tests and put one over on a tightly-wound killjoy dean played by Robert Wagner?
I’m not sure what the big deal is. When I was at USC, every semester during exams there would be bomb threats phoned in. So many building had signs taped to the doors (pre WWW and twitter) warning of bomb threats that nobody took them seriously.
I tweeted this very thought early Friday morning. I’m not aware of any attack committed by aQ where there was a heads up given. I remember the IRA would occasionally give a warning that a bomb was planted somewhere. Perhaps the hoaxster had his terror organizations conflated?
I suspect that TPTB (literally, our president’s name is Powers) knew fairly quickly that it was a non-credible threat, but something seemed off enough to clear the campus as a precaution. There’s going to be a lot of second guessing about preparedness, though. Many of my students received warnings quite late. A number of folks mentioned that evacuation orders were unclear; there were clusters of students only a few feet away from buildings instead of being well clear.
The LSU bomb threat hoaxster was busted yesterday. No word regarding the fate of UT’s criminal mind as of yet.