Collegio Online

Issue date: 11/20/08 Section: Front Page

Media Credit: Brett Armbruster While on the scene of the bomb threat in Kelce on Nov. 18, President Bryant takes a moment to talk to his wife, Koeta.

Media Credit: brett armbruster After a call reporting that a bomb was located in Kelce Hall was made to the Pittsburg police on Tuesday, Nov. 18, campus police shut down Kelce and the adjacent buildings, Hughes Hall and Horace Mann, and taped them off to secure the area. State troopers, with the assistance of two bomb dogs and campus police chief Mike McCracken, seached Kelce, but found nothing.

Campus police are investigating a bomb threat in Kelce Hall that took place on Tuesday evening, although they say they don't have much to go on.
"We're getting background information on the phone and the number, and following up on the leads we've gotten," Mike McCracken, chief of campus police, said. "It'll be one of those things that takes some time to find the person who did it."
Police evacuated two campus buildings following a bomb threat just before 5 p.m. Tuesday. However, a search using bomb-sniffing dogs found no bombs and no one was injured.
Pittsburg police relayed the information to the campus police, who were the first responders on the scene. The officers quickly evacuated Kelce and the neighboring Hughes Hall and cordoned off the area with police tape.
According to McCracken, who was the officer in charge of the scene, the police called in a couple of bomb-sniffing dogs from the Kansas Highway Patrol, based out of Topeka. However, the Topeka dogs were busy, so dogs had to be driven from Wichita.
Once the buildings were secured, all of the classes in both Kelce and Hughes were canceled for the rest of the day. The cancellations were posted on the university's Web site, with the reason listed for cancellation being "inclement weather." Since most students didn't expect classes being canceled, many showed up at the buildings, only to find them roped off and closed.
Analia Saldivar, senior in accounting, says she was on her way to her night class in Kelce when she saw the police cars and the yellow tape.
"I was finishing up with work in Horace Mann and I came outside," Saldivar said. "I had class at 6:30, and I saw everything that was going on. That's how I found out class was canceled."
Also present on the scene were several members of PSU's administration, including Howard Smith, assistant to the president and legislative liaison, Ron Womble, director of public relations, Joan Cleland, administrative assistant to the president, and PSU President Tom Bryant. Bryant says he was leaving campus for the day to attend a meeting when he received a call from one of the administrators and headed over to the scene.
"There was no reason I felt like I had to stay; I just wanted to," Bryant said. "I felt better once the state troopers got there and started doing their thing."
Bryant and the other administrators stayed until the troopers arrived shortly after 8 p.m.
"They called me at home once they had finished and told me everything was OK," Bryant said.
The scene, which included fire alarms and flashing lights going off in both Hughes and Kelce, attracted the attention of some students who were in the area.
"I thought something had happened during class because I could hear sirens going off outside," James Taylor, junior in elementary education, said. "We had people leave class because they were scared. But we had a test, and you can't make those up."
Taylor says he was on break from Mark Peterson's political science class and he came to check out what was going on. He was curious as to why only classes in Hughes and Kelce were canceled, rather than classes across campus.
"Why haven't they shut down all of campus?" Taylor asked. "It's not that far from one building to another."
Richard Dearth, dean of the College of Business, says that only classes in those two buildings were canceled because of their close proximity to the threat.
"Some of the classes in progress had to be let out early, and all classes after the buildings were closed were canceled," Dearth said.
However, some classes that were not in Kelce and Hughes were canceled anyway.
"Our teacher let us out early because she had heard what was going on with Kelce," Timi Myers, junior in social work, said.
Myers' class had been held in Russ Hall.
Around 8 p.m., the state troopers with the bomb-sniffing dogs arrived. The procedure the troopers followed involved two sweeps of the building; the first time they went through the building without the dogs to check for areas the dogs would need to sniff; the second time they went in with the dogs for a thorough search.
"That way when we open the building back up, we know it's safe," McCracken said.
The troopers and the dogs took about 50 minutes to complete the search, going through the entire building and around the perimeter, and packed up around 9:30 p.m. without having found a trace of a bomb.
Kyle Moomau, lieutenant of the K-9 unit of the state police, declined to disclose information about what the dogs were smelling for.
"That's not information we can give out," Moomau said. "We don't want people to know what the dogs are trained to smell."
Moomau also declined comment on what the Topeka-based K-9 unit had been doing that prevented them from responding to the situation.
"We don't want to advertise what the dogs were doing," Moomau said. "It's bad for business."
Bryant says he was happy with the way the situation turned out, despite the fact that it took four hours to see completion.
"Even though we have not had any experience with bomb threats in recent years, we take it very seriously," Bryant said. "We're not going to leave anything to chance, and we did that very efficiently."
Womble says that this was the first time he had seen a bomb threat at PSU.
"I've been on campus 21 years, and I can't remember one," he said.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools