by David Chapman
Staff Writer
A bomb scare at the University of North Florida last Thursday was just that — a scare. But the response was handled like any potential crisis by the university’s Crisis Management Team.
When suspicious packages were found outside of the Frederick H. Schultz Hall, it triggered a domino-effect response by university officials that led to the evacuation of the surrounding buildings and probe into the packages’ contents.
The packages turned out to be a student’s art project and the situation was resolved in about two hours. Security officials said the response was a success.
However, some students wondered if the response was enough and all the necessary precautions were taken, especially following a recent seminar at UNF taught by officials who handled the shootings at Virginia Tech. In that crisis, the shooter attacked two separate areas of the campus.
At UNF, the first response was the activation of the university’s Crisis Management Team made up of incident commanders: Vice President Chief of Staff Tom Serwatka; Associate Vice President of Student Affairs Everett Malcolm; Director of Environmental Health and Safety Dan Endicott; and Associate Vice President of Administration and Finance Richard Crosby.
“The university police department responded in about three minutes of the notification of the suspicious package,” said Crosby.
A patrolling policeman discovered the first package and initiated the response in the surrounding area.
“My first reaction when I heard about the situation was that we needed to get everyone away from the area,” said Mark Foxworth, chief of the UNF Police Department and adviser to the team.
Several buildings around Schultz Hall were evacuated, and a sweep of the area turned up three other suspicious packages, which were all located in areas where evacuation routes were plotted and thus led to a heightened awareness, said Foxworth.
“Any time you see something in an area like an evacuation route, where people would traffic, you have to pay attention,” said Foxworth.
Crisis Management Team officials sent out a campus-wide student e-mail bulletin at 11:40 a.m., alerting faculty, staff and employees in buildings south of the Schultz building to evacuate. However, eight buildings containing students just north of where the packages were found were not evacuated.
“A friend of mine was at his computer and got the e-mail,” said Brian Major, a mechanical engineer student who was working on a project in the Science and Engineering Building, north of the incident. “We all just hung out and kept working. If it was necessary, I think they would have evacuated us.”
Foxworth said buildings north of Schultz were not evacuated because a sweep of the area did not find anything suspicious and other buildings were between those and a potential blast area. Crosby added the situation was resolved before a northern campus evacuation was necessary.
But one student, who wasn’t evacuated, felt uneasy about the situation when she first heard about it.
“I was very nervous,” said Veronica Adderson, a nursing student who was in J. Brooks Brown Hall at the time. “The first thing I thought about was the Virginia Tech incident. I think they should have evacuated everyone and let them return later.”
Adderson said her class found out about the incident through the UNF Web site and that she was given permission by her professor to leave but declined to do so.
The Web site home page and campus-wide student e-mail, said Crosby, were effective for students near computers, but a public address system in the buildings failed to work and led to confusion.
“It would be far superior had the public address system worked,” said Crosby. “We’ve put top priority on assessing the system to determine failure and then fix it.”
Finally, a student claimed the boxes as part of an art project . At 12:56 p.m., another campus-wide e-mail was sent to resume normal university activities.
Between the two e-mails, though, the team enacted its crisis plan under the assumption the packages were indeed bombs and continued to do so even after the student reported it was part of an art project. Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office officials X-rayed all four devices to be certain they were not harmful.
“In any situation like this, it’s always better to be safe than sorry,” said Foxworth.
Aside from the failed public address system, both Crosby and Foxworth said the response was effective.
Foxworth noted that efforts are in place by university officials to contact students in potential crisis situations through an automated voice mail message on their cell phones as part of a “Code Red” alert system.
“You always learn from situations like these and we’ll apply those lessons in the future,” said Foxworth, “but I think we did a good job assessing and handling this one.”