Monday, February 16, 2009

What is the point?

Last night, as we were leaving the church after the Compline service ended, some of the students started going on about staying away from the Pit and the Davis Library because those areas had been evacuated.

"Evacuated?"

"Yeah, apparently there was a bomb threat and they evacuated that entire area."

Mind you, this was a bit past 10.00 pm when all of this was going on. I asked a couple of students, who had their cell phones out, if they received any text messages from the university. Much to my surprise, they said no.

This made no sense whatsoever. Every time I change my ONYEN (UNC password), I get to a screen asking me if I want to register my cell phone number to receive text messages as part of the Alert Carolina program. As I don't have a cell phone or any phone that can receive text messages, I opted out of that.

But one would think that for incidents like this, students should have received a text message, informing them of what was going on at that part of campus. I also checked my School of Medicine email account, to where I would have received any university-wide messages, and there I received no messages related to the bomb threat.

I checked the Daily Tar Heel this morning, and there was indeed a story that stated someone called in a bomb threat a little before 9.00 pm last night. Interestingly enough, someone stated in the comments section that a parent had heard breaking news of a bomb threat from a news station in Greensboro, rang up the child to ask what was going on, and the child couldn't say honestly what was going on because of the lack of information!

Rumours were going around, like someone had a gun on campus and started shooting at people.

Honestly, if you're going to set up such an alert service, you would think it would be used for a situation like this, especially if an entire area on campus was evacuated due to a safety threat.

/end rant

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