The message, sent at 7:32 a.m., instructed students that UMass classes had been canceled until at least 11 a.m. due to a suspicious device found in the University's Herter Hall.
According to the Oct. 26 issue of The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, a short while after 9 a.m., UMass lifted its security alert as the suspected device was determined not to be a threat,
The Daily Collegian said that shortly after 5 a.m., a custodian in Herter Hall found an empty 30-pack beer container with a battery outside and wires running inside. Included with it was a note cautioning, "If this is moved it will explode." Ultimately, the UMass Police Department, along with the Amherst Fire Department and state police bomb squad determined that the object was not an actual explosive device.
Amherst College Campus Police first heard of the threat at roughly 6:30 a.m., according to Police Chief John Carter. The Dean of Students, Office of Public Affairs and college administration were promptly alerted.
In just over an hour, the campus-wide e-mail was sent by Lieber. "I spoke with the campus police and decided that it would be appropriate to notify all our students because there was a good chance that some number of our students would be taking courses at UMass during the day," said Lieber.
While the threat posed no immediate danger to the Amherst Campus and ultimately proved to be spurious, it did put into the spotlight the College's emergency notification system.
Following the Virginia Tech massacre on Apr. 16, according to Carter, the College looked into how it could improve its emergency preparedness and saw that its notification system needed improvement. Six months later, and the college is just weeks away from completing its upgraded warning system.
According to Carter, the new system will allow the College to send out simultaneous e-mails, voicemails and text messages alerting students of an on-campus emergency. In addition, horns that will sound should an emergency arise are being installed around campus. "When you're walking outside, you're not at your computer, you're not in a classroom. You would hear the horn and you would know enough to check your cell phone or go somewhere and log onto your e-mail and get the message," said Carter.
According to Carter, colleges across the country are looking into similar improvements in emergency notification in wake of the inadequacies that plagued the Virginia Tech tragedy. "On the college campuses now, I think that over time you'll find that people will be ingrained to the fact that if you hear an emergency horn, you shelter where you are, and try to find out what's going on through electronic means," Carter said.
Director of Information Technology Peter Schilling said that the IT Department first looked into this new system about a year ago, even before Virginia Tech. He said that Hurricane Katrina provided just as much motivation to look into a new system.
Formerly, were an emergency to occur on campus, the school could send out a school-wide e-mail alert as well as a message to every campus voicemail box. However, the proliferation of cell phones and abandonment of campus phones left this system inadequate. Schilling said that this year, just 10 students have campus phones.
Using a company called NTI, all college employee contact information, in addition to the contact information provided by students, is put into a database. Several authorized personnel, including Chief Carter and Dean Lieber, are capable of sending simultaneous e-mails, text messages and phone messages to every address within this database. Once operational, the database will be cycled on a daily basis to update contact information. Schilling expects to test the system the week of Nov. 12.
So far, according to Telecommunications and Networking Director Stephen Judycki, the College has collected 1375 sheets of student contact information to be included in the database.
"The text messaging, the mass notification system, the horns -that is going to be used for an immediate threat on our campus," said Carter. "Something like [Thursday's UMass incident], we thought, was something you needed to know. It was important information to share with the community, but it wasn't an immediate threat to us. Now, if that was on our campus, that would change entirely."