The University’s Sept. 17 bomb threat sent the campus into a frenzy of students and faculty trying to evacuate, creating dead-stop traffic for hours in the areas around campus. After the incident, one question was frequently asked: “How can 90,000 people leave campus in an orderly and timely manner after a football game but not during an emergency?”
The answer is contraflow — a plan that requires cooperation from everyone involved, hours of preparation and more than 300 police officers from different agencies, according to LSU Police Department spokesman Capt. Cory Lalonde.
Thus, evacuating the campus in such an orderly manner in an instance like a bomb threat “is not feasible” due to the lack of officers and time to plan contraflow, Lalonde said.
After University football games, more than 100 of about 300 officers are specifically assigned to intersections on and off campus to coordinate vehicles.
“It takes hours to set up and three to four hours to return traffic to normal afterwards,” Lalonde said.
He said it takes police about four to six hours to set up the interstate for contraflow from New Orleans during hurricane evacuations.
And even if contraflow was implemented successfully to evacuate campus, Lalonde said a number of problems could arise, which could make traffic even worse.
Making sure roads are safe for drivers to drive in oncoming lanes is one of the biggest problems.
“On a game day, if there’s one accident on Stanford [Avenue], that gets moved off the road in five minutes,” Lalonde said. “It can affect the flow for up to an hour or more.”
Another problem is getting officers to campus to assist in an emergency, since contraflow would prevent them from driving to campus, Lalonde said.
It would also affect parents trying to pick up children from the LSU Child Care Center and the LSU Laboratory School.
According to the Florida Department of Transportation, contraflow does not even double the volume of people leaving an area — it increases it by about 33 percent.
After the bomb threat, University administrators said most of the campus was cleared within 80 minutes, though students tweeted pictures two hours later showing they were still stuck in traffic. In a poll on The Daily Reveille’s website, 56 percent out of 265 students responded that it took them longer than an hour to get off campus.
Associate Vice Chancellor for University Relations Herb Vincent countered, saying LSUPD used time-stamped photos to verify most of the campus was clear in 90 minutes and that some parts near north campus were not clear for about two hours.
