Tier bomb threat a hoax
Threats ‘usually when exam scheduled’: McCallum
Magally Zelaya, staff
At 11:58 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 2, an unidentified caller told the University 1 office that there was a bomb in the Tier building and to evacuate everyone from the building.
The threat was called in by an off-campus payphone, and forced classes to end early, exams to be rescheduled, and called emergency protocol at the University of Manitoba into question.
Though the threat was found to be a low-risk hoax, the possibility of a bomb on campus started a series of emergency procedures on campus.
At 12:01 p.m., the university’s security services were informed of the threat, three minutes after the call was received in the University 1 office.
Linda Lavallee, director of security services at the University of Manitoba, said that 911 was immediately dialed and that the police assessed the risk to be low. The university had also assessed the threat to be low-risk based on the nature of the call.
University security services sent their own patrol officers to the Tier building, arriving at 12:08 p.m., 10 minutes after the threat was received.
At 12:09 p.m., the fire alarm was pulled by university security services and the building was evacuated.
The city of Winnipeg’s emergency services did not arrive until 12:29 p.m. — nearly half an hour after the university’s security services were informed.
The city’s emergency workers swept the building and found it to be safe and clear of suspicious packages. Approximately an hour after the police arrived, students and staff were allowed back in.
During the police’s scan of the building, many of the student and staff waited for word that they could re-enter while standing outside the building, causing concern for director of University 1, Christine Blais.
“If there had been a bomb, everybody was standing so close we would have been killed. But there was no way to move people on,” she said.
Lavallee said that had either the police or the university’s security services determined the risk to be anything other than low, protocol would have been to move into the “second stage” — other buildings may have been evacuated and people would have been advised to move further away.
Vice-president (academic) Debbie McCallum said that evacuation has not always been the response to low-risk threats.
“I know in the past when calls have been received if the police have assessed it as a hoax sometimes we [didn’t] even evacuate. But that was quite a while ago that we used to [make] those decisions. These days, the way things are going . . . you have to be much more careful,” she said.
“We’ve had the occasional bomb threat, I think every university does and it’s usually when there’s an exam scheduled,” McCallum explained. “In this case, our people that chose to evacuate were being cautious and that’s a good thing. Unfortunately, students have to have their exams rescheduled,” said McCallum.
The incident on Nov. 2 forced the rescheduling of two exams.
McCallum said that other universities have contingency plans for exam disruptions. “At some universities if there is a threat going on they simply relocate the exam immediately to another location. That’s one thing that we’re going to look at as a possibility.”
On Nov. 6, the university took part in a Winnipeg police service scenario-based training exercise designed to prepare effective responses to critical incidents. The “table-top” exercise did not involve simulation.
All the province’s post-secondary institutes attended, as well as representatives from the city’s emergency preparedness program, the Department of National Defence, and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, among many other agencies.
McCallum said that a lot was learned through the exercise. “We learned that we really need to focus on communication. That that’s the key thing — getting the word out when there is an emergency.”
The university is not in the practice of relaying low-risk security events to students. “We don’t want to start broadcasting every time there is a hoax because it does kind of encourage copycats,” said McCallum.
McCallum said plans for a system to deliver text messages to students and staff are under way. She also noted the possibility of a new speaker system that would be installed throughout the university.
Though there are no suspects, Lavallee said the Winnipeg police are investigating the incident. If a suspect is found, Lavallee said, “We will have them charged. There will be no leniency when it comes to that.”
