The first raindrops fell at about 5 p.m. Thursday. Half an hour later, the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning, and drenched students sought refuge in buildings throughout campus.
“I’m not a big fan of storms,” freshman Andi Kwasniewski said. “So I started freaking out a little bit.”
According to Ken Long, director of IU-Bloomington Emergency Management and Continuity, the Bloomington Police Department operates more than 40 sirens, and IU has 6 on campus. Yet some failed to sound Thursday evening because of a software problem.
The Bloomington Police Department is helping investigate the issue.
“It’s a really complicated system,” Long said. “But we’ve been using it for a long time.”
Kwasniewski said she was in Jordan Hall for a finite math class when a fire alarm sounded and her professor dismissed the class. From there, she traveled directly to a friend’s room in Teter Quad.
As phones began buzzing with the warning, Kwasniewski said and she and her friends decided to head to the basement, where she said the mood was relaxed and the presence of her friends calmed her nerves.
Next door in Wright Quad dining hall, RPS staff ushered everyone to the lower level. Orders were cancelled, dinners were left on tables, and, in the rush of it all, one girl dropped a bowl of pasta just outside the doors to the dining area.
Those doors were locked behind her. No one re-entered until the warning had expired and the doors were unlocked at 6:10 p.m.
“That’s exactly what we want to do,” Long said.
However, not all students were so aware of the danger.
Sophomore Caroline Kocot was in the Student Building for a long class and didn’t find out about the tornado warning until her mother called her long after it had expired.
Unlike Kwasniewski and Amal Janabayev, a junior in Hodge Hall, Kocot did not hear a fire alarm. She did not hear her phone and did not hear a siren.
Sirens, IU Notify, social media updates and word of mouth are all part of an intentionally redundant system that aims to inform as many people as possible.
Long said every building has an emergency action plan, or a consolidation of several, as well as people who compose an emergency control committee. However, there aren’t enough of those designated committee members to take care of every detail.
“We can’t expect one way to notify people and for it to always work,” Long said. “We should all look out for each other.”
That is exactly what happened in the Bryan ground floor lounge of McNutt Quad, where freshman Dorothy Vincent was studying finite math with friends.
Resident assistants came around and told the lounge population to go to the basement, and Vincent said they instructed students to tell friends to seek shelter.
Vincent, a Wisconsin native, said it felt a little scary when tornado warnings popped up on phones and the television because she isn’t used to Southern Indiana weather patterns.
Elisa Ramirez, who came from Venezuela to IU for the String Academy last year, said she is not used to tornadoes either.
She was practicing violin in the Music Annex when an alert came over her phone. She immediately went to the basement, where she asked an older student if she could continue practicing.
Ramirez said the storm was frightening, but not enough to keep her from her violin. She passed people peering at the dark clouds through windows as she returned to her practice room.
Fellow Jacobs student Zach Barnes had just wrapped up cello practice and was on his way to his room in Ashton Center when he saw an empty IU bus pulled over.
The sign that usually presented the bus’s route instead noted severe weather and urged readers to seek shelter.
According to Long, in the case of a tornado warning, buses are supposed to stop at the nearest building and evacuate passengers.
People can get a little callous when their plans are interrupted by a tornado warning, but it’s most important to stay safe, Long said.
