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• Student on June 16, 2002
  It wasn't "little disruption" in some senses... Students seemed to clog up the streets as they left for Mickey Ds and Starbucks. Also, information wasn't brought about correctly. I was told that the 3rd floor was closed and the computer labs were flooding, but later found that students had actually been working in them, which upset me because of what I could have been doing at that time.
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• faculty on June 17, 2002
  I agree with the last comment. The students and teachers did not know what to do. Even though we have standard procedures for fire alarms, it came at a time when many students were leaving because of the half day exams. No one was allowed back into the building so it left students who did not have a ride home flooding into the streets and near-by businesses. I thought there were some real safety issues here.
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• me~~ on June 18, 2002
  MAYBE there should be a MUCH SAFER evacuation plan, instead of Administration giving students some half a$$ed answer and telling us to "get off the property", without giving second thought to the 3,500 students that flood University blvd. (That cross against the lights.....), and get packed into McDonald's and Starbucks and Subway. Administration didn't have an evacuation planned for a situation like this like they should have. This is a perfect example of the public school system "at work"
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• Kevin L. (View Email) on June 18, 2002
  I just want to point out that you all are talking like a plan for this is a simple thing to come up with and isn't virtually impossible.
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• a student on June 19, 2002
  "Little disruption."
  
  Please repeat that to the people who didn't have rides and were planning to stay in the school until the buses came.
  
  Disrupted their entire afternoon...
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• Kevin Chang on June 19, 2002
  Actually, "a student," I was one of the students who had to stay the entire afternoon. The building was quickly reopened and computer labs were among the rooms available, so anyone planning to stay at school had no problems. In fact, this story was posted before 1:00 from a Blair computer.
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• Chris Mulligan (View Email) on June 19, 2002
  Student's who had to stay were instructed to go to the stadium, as is standard policy for any evacauation.
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• unknown on June 19, 2002
  you should tell the reward on this page.
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• Harry on June 21, 2002
  Kinda funny if you ask me this year alone we had two fire drills, two fires, three pranks ("accidental" pulls), five false alarms, two broken sprinklers (rembember that small gym), and two bomb threats. Man, it seems odd that we even need to do fire drills, after all we get more pratice with the reall thing. Also personaly I don't think it was an accident that Blair was so convenelty located next to the fire department.
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• Kevin Chang on June 21, 2002
  Harry, security determined that they really were accidental pulls, not pranks. Really. They found the people and have tapes of what happened.
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• Resident Cynic (02) on August 3, 2002
  This does not pertain directly to the article, but more indirectly to Harry's comment.
  
  Every alarm should be in sight of a camera, if they aren't already. Punishments for prank pulls and bomb threats should be increased significantly, to the point of expulsion and jail time for the bomb threat.
  
  People need to realize things like this aren't funny, it's not a joke. It wasn't funny before 9/11, and it definitely isn't funny now.
  
  I'm of the belief that the only way you can really get people to stop doing something is if you enforce the rule strictly and increase the punishment to the point where a 'prank' isn't worth the risk. Think about it - if prank pulling the fire alarm had an automatic death penalty, who would do it? And if somebody would, they're too stupid to live anyway, so it does't make much of a difference.
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