Days After UT Scare, LSU Campus Evacuated
BATON ROUGE, LA (CBSDFW.COM/AP) - Three days after a bomb scare at the University of Texas at Austin, Louisiana State University had a bomb threat of their own to handle.
Just as they were at the UT campus on Friday -- Thousands of students, professors and workers were evacuated from Louisiana State University's main campus Monday, school officials said.
The evacuation was prompted by a threat phoned into 911 about 10:32 a.m., university spokeswoman Kristine Calongne said. Calongne said the caller didn't direct the threat to any specific area of the campus.
The university issued a statement on its website announcing the evacuation an hour later, then distributed the information through text messages, emails and social media.
"A bomb threat has been reported on the LSU campus," the statement said. "Please evacuate as calmly and quickly as possible."
There are 30,000 students, professors and university employees located on the Baton Rouge campus, but it was not clear how many were present at the time of the threat.
"Monday ... is a very big class day, so I think the majority of that group was probably on campus at the time," Calongne said.
By early afternoon Monday, the LSU campus was largely deserted with roads leading onto campus blocked by police. The major arteries heading away from campus were congested, packed with traffic.
Catherine Lacoste, an 18-year-old freshman and architecture major, said she received notification of the bomb threat through the emergency text message system while working in a studio on a project. She double-checked the information and then evacuated. She didn't seem worried about the threat, however.
"I'm going to go home, take a nap and hopefully campus will be open again when I wake up," Lacoste said. State police bomb technicians were on the scene, said Louisiana State Police Capt. Doug Cain. He said authorities were talking to their counterpart at the University of Texas to see if there were any similarities to the threat they received Friday.
No explosives were found at the UT Austin campus.
Calongne said she doesn't know of any other time the entire flagship university campus was evacuated. "I've been at LSU since 1990 -- if you count my student years -- and I don't ever recall us having an evacuation of the whole campus," she said.
(©2012 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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