Bomb threats over the weekend do not get ENS alert

An anonymous bomb threat targeting Bellefield Hall, Bellefield Tower and the Cathedral of… An anonymous bomb threat targeting Bellefield Hall, Bellefield Tower and the Cathedral of Learning was delivered to the email address of a local reporter on Saturday at 2:25 p.m.

But breaking with normal procedure, the University didn’t send out an Emergency Notification System alert.

Pitt spokesman Robert Hill said in an email that the case of inaction in regard to the alert was not a change in policy by the University, but rather it was incongruence between the time that the threat was issued and the time that University officials were notified. The email containing the threats was not forwarded to the University until 8:50 p.m., nearly six and a half hours after the email was initially received.

“Because so much time had passed since the initial receipt of the threat, it was not considered to be imminent, and a general ENS message was not sent,” Hill said.

Hill said that once the University had received word of the threats, University officials promptly followed basic procedure in clearing the targeted campus buildings.

Since Bellefield Tower is not a Pitt facility, the University immediately forwarded the threat against it to the owner of the building.

“The two Pitt buildings targeted by the threat, Bellefield Hall and the Cathedral of Learning, were immediately searched, and no evidence of explosives of any type was found,” he said.

Hill said that neither the Cathedral nor Bellefield Hall was heavily occupied Saturday night, which aided in the speed of the completed searches; however, some people were asked to evacuate.

“A musical group practicing in Bellefield Hall was asked to leave that building while the search was underway, and no one was permitted to enter either building until the searches had been completed,” Hill said.

Rumors of the potential unreported threats prompted people to take to blogs and social media sites such as Reddit and Twitter on Sunday. Commenters cited the Pitt Police scanner and second and third-hand accounts of the threats within their posts on the message boards.

One commenter claimed that several people were in the Cathedral when the threat was received and that the building was locked down, instead of evacuated, and students were not allowed to leave.

Hill said that this was not the case.

“Neither building was ‘locked down’ in the sense that anyone was denied the right to leave the building,” Hill said.

This weekend was not the first time that Pitt did not send out an ENS alert after receiving a bomb threat.

During an interview on WPTS last week, Hill said that on April 3, Litchfield Towers received its first bomb threat, sent to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at 2 a.m. Hill said that while Pitt police were processing the threat, another one came through an hour after the first. Pitt then evacuated Towers. An Emergency Notification System alert was not sent out concerning the evacuation.

On April 7, Hill said that another bomb threat was sent to one of his “devices” at 10 p.m. Because he was traveling, he did not see it until 24 hours later on April 8.

“So obviously there was no evacuation then, but there was also no device that exploded,” Hill said in the interview. “So basically that was another hoax but something we didn’t know about until basically after the fact.”