
UT-Austin completely evacuated because of bomb threat - eegilbert
http://www.utexas.edu
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teach
It's almost certainly a hoax, of course. I'm fairly certain there's never been
a bomb threat on an American school where there turned out to be an actual
bomb.

Not once in any school in the United States, ever in the entire history of the
nation.

I've really looked for a counterexample, but I haven't found any. If any of
you have one, I'd love to hear it.

~~~
MattRogish
It seems remarkably easy and consequence-free to disrupt major institutions
like universities, sporting events, etc.

The answer probably isn't to ignore the threat, but it seems there's gotta be
a better solution than shutting the entire thing down. Maybe not.

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jameskilton
It's not just Austin: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19602986>

I've heard from a friend in Austin that this is a hoax. Sounds like this might
be related to the anti-Islam film.

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driverdan
Why is this on HN? Hoaxes like this happen daily.

~~~
smcguinness
We had a discussion about this about how often bomb threats get made to
universities. I felt as if this was a rare thing, which is why, IMO, when it
does happen the news picks it up.

However, my coworker thought that it does happen often, but is curious as to
how they then distinguish between what might be legitimate and what they
immediately think is a hoax.

Then we both thought, if you do want to make a bomb threat, how do you decide
who to call? Deans office? Football Coach? Ombudsman?

~~~
teach
I'm at a public school in suburban Austin, and we get probably one bomb threat
a year (that I know about). We evacuate for each one, unfortunately.

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enraged_camel
Bruce Schneier wrote an excellent piece about this very topic back in April.
It's worth a read:
[http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/04/bomb_threats_a...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/04/bomb_threats_as.html)

(Reader comments are great, too.)

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jmsduran
What perplexes me is that the threat was called in at around 8:30 am and
claimed bombs will go off around 10 am. UT made the decision to evacuate at
9:53 am, 7 minutes before the called threat. Is 7 minutes an ample amount of
time to evacuate a campus this large?

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cobrausn
North Dakota State University has been evacuated as well.

[http://www.chron.com/communityblogs/atmosphere/article/North...](http://www.chron.com/communityblogs/atmosphere/article/North-
Dakota-State-evacuated-3865583.php)

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brianfryer
Yikes! Looks like I'll take Mopac into downtown today.

Hope the threat doesn't amount to anything...

