By Dennis O’Neil, Brad Atzinger & Chris Brown
Students and staff at the University of Louisville got a taste of just how the school’s safety plans work when several bomb scares affected Belknap Campus Thursday and Friday.
According to U of L spokesman John Drees, the school’s associate vice president for communications and marketing, no building was identified in the first incident when a bomb threat was received around 10:45 a.m. on Thursday. The Miller Inforamtion Technology Center was evacuated after operators at the university’s main switch board in the building received two threatening phone calls.
Students and staff got the okay to return to the building after police searched and cleared the area.
In a second incident, which happened around 7 p.m. on Thursday, police said a student received an e-mail off-campus claiming there was a bomb somewhere on campus. Another student reported a suspicious package outside Ekstrom Library after the e-mail was received, police said.
A bomb-sniffing dog was sent from Louisville International Airport to sniff out the package, but Drees said the canine did not pick up anything from the small white box labeled “C-4.”
“He didn’t pay any attention to it,” Drees said. “They ended up having to lead him to [the package], and he didn’t smell any thing.”
The object, which turned out to be a brick-sized box wrapped in white paper connected by wire to a small paper “detonator,” was collected by the FBI later that evening.
Richard Bowling, a freshman engineering student, saw the first hoax package sitting beneath a tree in the quad. “Whoever did this has no respect for the tragedy our nation has just faced,” he said.
Another scare on Friday morning had police investigating what turned out to be a similar hoax package left between Grawemeyer Hall, where the President and Provost’s offices are housed, and the Schneider Hall art building.
Many people – most of whom were staff members – cleared out of the buildings at the advice of university police, but a mandatory evacuation was not issued in this incident, said Maj. Kenneth Brown with U of L’s Department of Public Safety.
After each of the incidents, university officials recommended students and staff go about their regular activities.
The university community was notified via mass e-mail, postings on the university Web site and security flyers around campus as each incident unfolded.
Just after 11 a.m. Thursday, for example, Provost Dr. Shirley Willihnganz issued a statement to The Cardinal about how the administration is handling the situation. She stated that the university is trying to act as quickly as possible, without creating panic if they did not believe it was necessary.
“Right now, we want everyone to sit tight,” Willihnganz stated. “Standard protocol at this point is that we have some leads, and we are trying to figure out where the phone call[s] may have come from.”
Around noon on Thursday, U of L President Dr. James R. Ramsey and Vice President for Business Affairs Larry Owsley made a trip into Mitzi’s, the restaurant on the lower level of the MITC, to “assure students and staff that the situation was being handled.”
“We are tracing the phone numbers that came in, with help from the FBI and the local police,” Owsley said. “Even though we think things are under control, we want everyone to know we are checking things out as thoroughly as we can.”
Brown also said there were some e-mails received in connection with the incidents, but that university police were working on tracking down the sender or senders late last week.
Ramsey issued a statement Friday, assuring students and staff that U of L is “doing everything possible to ease our students’ concerns and to provide the best and safest” learning environment. “No university can guarantee that it can prevent something like the Va. Tech tragedy from happening on its campus,” he said, however.
And that worries some students, who said they felt unsafe after the incidents, especially in light of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute shootings early last week.
“It is a really awkward time to have a bomb threat considering what just happened,” said junior chemical engineering major Jennifer Ellison, who was in the MITC at the time of the evacuation.
“They didn’t tell us why to leave, but just to leave,” Ellison said. “It freaked everyone out a bit and made me very wary of coming back.”
Junior interior design major Grays Miller said she was not aware of the bomb threat, and it really made her question her own safety. “Knowing there was a bomb threat makes me feel pretty unsafe right now,” she said.
Other students, however, said they felt more angry than scared after the false alarms.
Freshman art major Elizabeth Farrar, who was at the scene of the first hoax package, said she was not frightened by the threats. “I treat it not with fear but with contempt. The actions were childish and insensitive,” she said.
Anyone with information or concerns is encouraged to contact the university police at 852-6111. It is still unclear whether the incidents are “copycat” events related to the Va. Tech shootings earlier this week, officials said.
