Rain boots and water puddles always make for gloomy days, but there’s never been perhaps a more depressing moment in our time on the LSU campus than Monday, when the bleak scene was accented by thousands of students rushing off campus only to be gridlocked in traffic.
As we look back on Monday’s bomb threat — and it’s important to note that nobody seems to recall when the University last experienced a bomb threat — a number of problems occurred, not that anyone would be able to tell based on the cheery news conference University officials delivered Monday afternoon.
Among the questions swirling through our minds after the text message snapped us into reality were: Is there really a bomb? What do they mean by “evacuate”? How long will sitting in traffic take?
Judging from Facebook and Twitter, most other students wondered the same things.
We hope whoever did this, whoever threatened our lives and our University, pays for it to the fullest extent. The University officials and police who are investigating should stop at nothing to ensure the safety of students, faculty, staff and whomever else was on campus.
As the investigation continues and suspects appear, we want justice for our campus and for students across the nation who bear the consequences of such outrageous and unsettling threats. We also demand that our administrators better prepare for this type of incident, should it happen again.
University Relations told The Daily Reveille, “Our plan in this type of situation is to communicate to students, faculty and staff to evacuate campus using their best method possible.”
What about students who live on campus? After receiving that text message, they had no idea where to go if they couldn’t take shelter at a friend’s apartment. They would have had to return to their on-campus housing to find out that dorms and apartments were being evacuated.
Then there’s the question of the text alert that told everyone to evacuate. Evacuate where? Out of your building? Off of campus completely? What about nearby campus locations — is The Chimes OK?
Those answers never came. Neither did an answer for how anyone could evacuate “as calmly and quickly as possible.” It would be a miracle if someone managed a speedy exit amid the unending lines of cars that tangled across Highland, Nicholson and nearly every other path that exited the University.
If a bomb had detonated within 30 minutes of students receiving the text message, not only would thousands of lives — or possibly 10 times that — have been lost, it also would have been nearly impossible for emergency vehicles to navigate the gridlock to set up a triage.
How is it that on gameday, 90,000 people can get on and off campus in a somewhat orderly fashion, but during a bomb threat, chaos ensues? We understand that games are planned for and bomb threats are out-of-the-blue, but the University should have procedures in place for contraflow and orderly evacuations.
Given the bomb threats on college campuses that came before LSU’s, it’s hard to believe that our University officials wouldn’t have re-evaluated our evacuation plans before Monday, but it appeared that they had not. We hope University officials used Monday to set a precedent for future emergencies.
