University releases bomb threat details

Director of Public Safety Paul Ominsky said that there was “some logistical confusion” in the University’s emergency notification response to the bomb threat that occurred on March 12, when asked about the incident at a meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Community on Monday.

Ominsky said that emergency management decisions are “well thought-out and joint decisions,” but noted that there was “some logistical confusion ... in our communications, and we are spending some time talking about how that all happened.”

He also released new details about the threat during the meeting.

Though an individual at the new chemistry building construction site notified Public Safety of a written bomb threat found on March 12, the message stated that an incident would occur on March 15, meaning that “there wasn’t an immediate threat right then and there,” Ominsky said.

He added, however, that the department takes all threats seriously. The construction site was evacuated on March 12, as were nearby Jadwin Hall, Icahn Laboratory and the architecture laboratory.

The Princeton Telephone and E-mail Notification System was activated only for the usual occupants of Jadwin and Icahn. The architecture lab was empty at the time.

The PTENS alert instructed the affected buildings’ occupants to evacuate while state and county bomb squads searched the construction site.

The University did not issue a campus-wide alert, meaning people walking in or around Jadwin or Icahn who were not usual occupants of the buildings would not have known about the threat.

Ominsky defended the University’s decision against restricting pedestrian traffic around Jadwin and Icahn even while the buildings themselves had been evacuated.

Since the threat was to the new chemistry building itself, there was enough buffer space between Jadwin and Icahn that pedestrians were a safe distance away, he said in an interview after the meeting. He added, though, that Jadwin was close enough to the construction site that prior to evacuation, the building’s occupants were asked to stay away from windows facing the construction site.

“This is a very complicated set of circumstances,” Ominsky explained. “We’re going to go back [to] try to do better in the future.”

Public Safety is conducting an ongoing investigation, Ominsky added.

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Other agenda items

The CPUC also discussed the recent USG emergency response survey, changes in election procedures for representatives to the council and improving “intellectual life” outside of the classroom.

Members passed an amendment to the CPUC charter requiring that elections of undergraduate student representatives to the council, who are also USG members, reflect current procedures used by the USG. Previously, the charter specified that a single transferable voting system was to be used.

“The amendment was a straightforward revision to reduce the future possibility of there being a conflict between the USG constitution and the CPUC charter,” USG president Michael Yaroshefsky ’12 said in an e-mail after the meeting.

Yaroshefsky also presented details of last fall’s emergency response survey at the meeting, including student awareness of mental health resources on campus.

Responding to an audience member’s question about recent suicides at Cornell, President Shirley Tilghman noted that the counseling center at McCosh Health Center has a “very, very effective program” about depression awareness that would allow faculty to be “better prepared to recognize a student that might be in trouble.”

A panel discussion about student intellectual life outside of the classroom also took place at the meeting, which aimed at “more seamless integration between their academic work and the lives that they lead outside” of school, Tilghman said.

The conversation also highlighted the need for better publicity of events and greater interaction between undergraduate and graduate students.