Bomb Threat at LSU
LSU students wait for buses to take them off campus Monday, Sept. 17, 2012 after a bomb scare. (Photo courtesy of Catherine Threlkeld of Daily Reveille)
The main campus of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge was evacuated Monday morning amid threats of a bomb on campus, according to news reports.
Reported traffic congestion and “vague” alerts during the evacuation raised questions here about UA’s evacuation plans.
Officials with UAPD and facilities management were not available for comment late Monday afternoon.
The 30,000 LSU students started evacuating at 11:32 a.m. after an emergency text message was sent out to students, according to The Daily Reveille, the university’s student-run newspaper.
Though no bomb was discovered, this marks the third all-campus evacuation across the country in the last week. The University of Texas at Austin and North Dakota State University were evacuated Friday because of similar threats.
Some streets were closed at LSU, with alternate routes made. Car traffic on the alternative routes came to a stop because of the traffic, The Daily Reveille reported.
“The managing editor and I got into a car and traffic was an absolute nightmare,” said Andrea Gallo, the editor-in-chief of The Daily Reveille. “It took 30 minutes to get to a place that would normally take two minutes.”
The same paper reported that students and faculty said the evacuation order was vague, not clarifying which buildings to evacuate, despite the whole campus being given the order.
Some students that received texts were confused because the message did not specify what needed to be evacuated and where to go, Gallo said.
“There’s 30,000 students and we were all trying to get off campus,” she said.
At UT, a similar text message was sent out at 9:45 a.m., 75 minutes after a caller told a university police dispatcher there were bombs placed across campus, according to The Daily Texan, the university’s student newspaper.
The caller said that bombs would start going off at 10:05 a.m., according to the article.
See Wednesday’s edition of The Traveler for information from UA officials on evacuation protocol.
