Police evacuated the Cathedral of Learning Monday morning after receiving the second bomb threat… Police evacuated the Cathedral of Learning Monday morning after receiving the second bomb threat in a week.
Alarms went off at 10:33 a.m., and an announcement came over loudspeakers instructed everyone in the building to evacuate. The building reopened at 12:31 p.m.
Confusion set in as hundreds of students, faculty and employees filed out of the building. The Emergency Notification Service alert, sent at 10:36 a.m., arrived to most in the crowd ten minutes after the alarms sounded.
The alert said that a general bomb threat had been received, but did not specify a location or time. Pitt police declined to comment at the scene and directed The Pitt News to media relations. Spokesman John Fedele said that outside of the Pitt ENS alert, he had no other information.
Pitt police ordered people to file across the street and away from the building, but the message went unheeded. Many students continued walking on the Cathedral sidewalk next to Bigelow Boulevard, and some stood on the building’s patio.
This is the second bomb threat against the Cathedral in the past six days. Sophomore Melissa Delia said she got evacuated from the same 11 a.m. class as the last bomb threat on Wednesday.
“It just gets annoying after awhile,” the anthropology major said, adding that it’s hard to remain concerned about the alarms when they keep happening.
“It can’t be taken seriously,” Delia said.
Freshman Christine Cogley was evacuated from her 10 a.m. statistics class and said that as a commuter student from the South Side, the cancelled classes are a hassle.
Between checking her phone for alerts, she said her friends have asked her if she’s “worried about Pitt” because of the recent threats, such as the Western Psychiatric Institute shooting over spring break and the Chevron bomb threat in February.
“Normally it’s a nice, quiet campus,” Cogley, an accounting major, said. “It’s just become a lot.”
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