Thousands of LSU student return to dorms after bomb threat

Louisiana State University's entire campus was evacuated after a bomb threat was called in Monday morning.  By evening students were able to return to their dorms after bomb-sniffer dogs had swept the area.

|
Catherine Threlkeld/AP
Students load a bus to take them off campus in front of Lockett Hall in Baton Rouge, La., Monday after an emergency text message was sent out. Thousands of students, professors and workers were evacuated from Louisiana State University's main campus following a bomb threat, school officials said.

The thousands of students who live on the Louisiana State University campus will be able to return to their dormitories after bomb-sniffing dogs and police methodically swept residential halls Monday following a threat that sparked a campus-wide evacuation.

LSU spokesman Herb Vincent said officials hope to reopen the Baton Rouge campus by Monday night, but they aren't certain if a building-by-building sweep will be complete before Tuesday.

"Residential Life buildings have now been deemed ready to return to normal operations. That notification is going out now to the campus community," Vincent said.

Evangeline Hall, a residential building on campus, was reopened first and officials began siphoning some of the 6,000 on-campus residents into the building as the investigation continued, Vincent said. He said residential halls were searched first and buses to and from the campus have been running normally.

Thousands of students, professors and workers were told to leave campus after a threat was phoned into 911 about 10:32 a.m., university spokeswoman Kristine Calongne said. But the threat did not indicate a specific part of campus, so police and bomb-sniffing dogs have been meticulously sweeping each of the 250 buildings on campus.

LSU Police Capt. Corey Lalonde said no explosives have been found thus far.

By mid-afternoon, the LSU campus was largely deserted and roads were closed, though some people and cars were still moving around. Police officers with dogs combed through buildings, including the computer services center.

State police bomb technicians were on the scene, said Louisiana State Police Capt. Doug Cain. He said authorities were talking to their counterparts in Texas, North Dakota and Ohio, where similar threats were received Friday, but officials say they're not sure if the phone call made Monday was connected to those threats. Police found no explosives on those campuses.

"It's kind of been an epidemic. This has been the fourth in a week. But it's better to be safe than sorry," said Joseph Vera, a communications disorders graduate student.

Vera and a fellow graduate student were working in a language clinic with seven children near the edge of campus when they received the text message about the bomb threat. The pair walked the children across the street to an off-campus restaurant and they called the children's parents.

The university sent a follow-up message to students at 1:36 p.m. telling them not to return.

Col. Mike Edmonson, Louisiana State Police superintendent, said despite some initial traffic congestion, the campus was evacuated in under an hour.

"Our goal is for the campus life and community at LSU to return to normal, that's our goal here," he said.

The university put out a statement on its website announcing the evacuation an hour after the phone call was received, then distributed the information through text messages, emails and social media.

"A bomb threat has been reported on the LSU campus," the statement said. "Please evacuate as calmly and quickly as possible."

There are 30,000 students, professors and university employees located on the Baton Rouge campus, but it was not clear how many were there at the time of the threat.

"Monday ... is a very big class day, so I think the majority of that group was probably on campus at the time," Calongne said.

Catherine Lacoste, an 18-year-old freshman and architecture major, said she received notification by text message while working in a studio on a project. She double-checked the information and then evacuated.

"I'm going to go home, take a nap and hopefully campus will be open again when I wake up," Lacoste said.

Kayla Johnson, 18, an English major, heard about the evacuation from a student who received the text message.

"I was in the middle of class and one of the guys in the back of the room raised his hand and said, 'The reason it's so loud outside is because there's been a bomb threat and we have to leave,'" Johnson said.

Students largely seemed to take the evacuation in stride.

"Nobody seems too worried about it," said Shelby Miller, 18, a biology major who was doing homework and eating Chinese food at the student union when she got word of the evacuation.

Miller headed to a nearby coffee shop right off campus to finish her homework.

Calongne said she doesn't know of any other time the entire flagship university campus was evacuated.

"I've been at LSU since 1990 — if you count my student years — and I don't ever recall us having an evacuation of the whole campus," she said.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Thousands of LSU student return to dorms after bomb threat
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0917/Thousands-of-LSU-student-return-to-dorms-after-bomb-threat
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe