North campus bomb scare found to be false alarm
At around 8 a.m. this past Wednesday a UMass Lowell (UML) employee discovered a mysterious looking device in the stairwell between Cumnock Hall and Falmouth Hall. Wrapped in black electrical tape with exposed wiring and a piece of PVC pipe protruding it was suspicious enough to warrant alerting the authorities.
The police department, following protocol, evacuated the building and notified the Lowell police department, the fire department and the state police bomb squad.
Cumnock hall was evacuated and teams were sent into surround buildings to do a search for safety’s sake. Students on North campus at the time would have seen a number of emergency vehicles present, as well as the students, staff, and faculty that were displaced from Cumnock by the evacuation.
Austin Condee, a freshman and resident of Eames hall, said “ I was interested as to why there were police cars and such everywhere. After I found out that they found a ’suspicious package’ I kind of expected it to be an engineering project of some kind.”
At around 9:30 a.m. an e-mail notification was sent out to students vaguely describing the situation.
The e-mail read “Reports of a bomb threat at Cumnock Hall. UML’s Cumnock Hall is closed until further notice.”
Upon arrival The bomb squad x-rayed the package as part of standard procedure. They then consulted with the UML Police Department and subsequently decided to cut open the device and proceeded to do so. The bomb squad discovered that the device contained a clear liquid and the device appeared to lack any electronics attached to the liquid. They elected to have the fire department HAZMAT team test it and the analysis revealed the fluid was regular water.
The device was traced back to an engineering student who had produced it for a course. The student had gotten the device back from the professor and had decided not to keep it and to leave it instead of throwing it away.
What basically amounted to a misunderstanding caused by simple littering may seem absurd to some.
Police chief Alan Roscoe said, “People don’t understand sometimes what suspicious packages generate. It all depends on the configuration and where it is.”
The authorities followed the designated protocol to the letter and an all-clear notification was sent out by e-mail at around 11:30 a.m. and Cumnock Hall was reopened. The incident ultimately went from alert to all clear in less than four hours. In addition, it was determined within half an hour of the initial alert that the evacuation of the immediate are was sufficient for safety and that a larger evacuation or class cancellation was unnecessary.
“We didn’t see a threat to the wider institution.” Roscoe said. “You always er on the side of caution. Always. It’s better to be safe than be sorry. It worked out well. If we thought for a moment it to be a threat to students we would have shut it down totally.”
The situation was beneficial in that it provided police and emergency personnel with the opportunity to put the protocols into practice and refine their response. Everything went smoothly and had there been a genuine threat, the way emergency personal reacted would have been appropriate.
There will be no disciplinary action against the student responsible, but the situation was still considered serious and should continue to be viewed as such.
“Students in the future, if they leave things around like that to provoke a reaction, and there may be some around that may want to do that, there’ll be serious consequences,” said Roscoe, who went on to state that penalties for creating such a hoax could be as serious as jail time.
Sorry, there are no related articles, check out some random articles
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
mmm great here a video about it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlSXYwmkmOQ