Auburn University students hope others take campus alerts seriously after confusing technical error
By Ayron Lewallen
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AUBURN, Alabama (WVTM) — It was a scary moment at Auburn University when students and faculty got multiple AU Alerts on Thursday. Three separate notifications were sent out alerting students to an active shooter on campus, a tornado warning and hazardous waste spill. A statement from the university blames a technical error for the confusion these notifications caused.
Some students told WVTM 13 they were in class when they got notifications from AU Alert telling them to take shelter. Some said they ran out of their classrooms to get to a safe place.
The alert sent to students said there was an active shooter on campus and told them it was not a drill. They were told to report to a safe place and wait for further instructions and to remember to barricade themselves, hide or fight.
One student said he was in class, looked around and saw everyone on their phones. He said there was confusion about whether they should leave the classroom or stay put. That’s when the professor made the decision and they ran.
Some students say they got multiple alerts — some even after the all clear came — and students said that’s concerning.
“Once you got out the classroom, you kind of realized people weren’t taking it that seriously or people were just confused,” Auburn University student Tripp Hedden said. “People were calling their moms. They were doing that kind of stuff. It was all strange. And then [the university’s] response to it was a little — it kind of left you wanting more because it was more like, ‘Oh, just a mistake,’ when people could have maybe kind of freaked out about that. It’s a big deal when you say there’s a shooter on campus.”
With the three different notifications sent out to students and faculty, with some saying they got all of them and others saying they only got one or two, that just created more confusion on the Plains. Even though the alerts were fake, AU student George Simmons hopes people will take them seriously next time one is sent out.
“This might have been the first major false alert,” he said. “I think all the alerts are pretty serious about if there’s a gas leak somewhere to alert the students, but this is probably the first event that this happened. I still have good faith in the alert system. It might have just been one mistake that’s probably handled, but I think we should everyone should still take it very seriously.”
A statement from Auburn’s website said the university is actively working to resolve the issue to keep this from happening again. The statement goes on to say it apologizes for any confusion. We’re told there was no threat to the campus or to the community and the alerts were triggered unintentionally.
WVTM 13 saw a meme floating around campus of a tornado holding two guns, making light of the situation. Gavin Bord even joked and said he thought it was a cat running across someone’s keyboard.
“It was scary at first when we got the first one, but then when all the rest of them came in, we figured it was probably just something going wrong,” he said. “I was just [in bowling class]. I really didn’t think that it was anything because it said there’s a tornado, and in the sky, there was no clouds.”
Students said some professors cancelled classes while others still had to go to their classes after they got the all clear.
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