Emergency evacuation ordered on Utah State campus for Old Main Building due to suspicious package

LOGAN, Utah (ABC4) — Utah State University issued an emergency alert ordering the Old Main Building to be evacuated.

The alert was issued at 2:44 p.m. on Tuesday, September 30. Anyone in the Old Main Building has been ordered to leave immediately using the nearest exit and to follow instructions from emergency personnel.

According to USU spokesperson Amanda DeRito, there was a suspicious package in the building, and police are responding. As of 3:45 p.m., the situation has been cleared, the Old Main Building is safe. Scheduled activities are returning to normal.

Witnesses told ABC4 that they were in class when they were evacuated, and they said that they saw bomb squad units outside the building and that there was a detonation of some kind.

Kiera Larsen, a USU student, told ABC4 that she was in class in Old Main when a man came in and told them they needed to evacuate the building.

“We all just took our backpacks. It didn’t really seem that serious, so we kind of just calmly walked out of the building, and once we got out, we saw all the police officers and the K-9 dogs, so I figured it was something a bit more intense than like a safety drill or something,” Sam Van Orden, another student at USU, said.

Maddie Widman said that she was in her environmental economics class, and she was about to go to Old Main to study when she got the alert. Students were told to go to the quad, and Widman and her friend Emma Miller watched the police set up their stations.

“A lot of unknowns and uncertainties, but hearing the police say, ‘fire in the hole’ and then detonation, I just started running, I didn’t know what was going on,” Widman described.

“I think they detonated it,” Miller said. “I just ran. It was loud and a bit chaotic.”

“There was a few shouts of ‘fire in the hole’ before it happened, and no one quite knew what was happening, and I think there was some shock, that there actually was something that might have exploded,” Larsen said.

Later tonight, Turning Point USA is scheduled to hold an event on USU campus, and several security measures have been put in place in anticipation of the event to ensure the safety of all attendees. The event tonight is going to be hosted by Alex Clark and will feature a panel of Governor Cox, Senator Lee (R-UT), Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and former Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz.

Witnesses told ABC4 that they weren’t expecting anything like this to happen today, despite tension on campus being heightened in the past few weeks due to Charlie Kirk’s killing and the political climate.

“Hearing some of the things on the news in the past few weeks, I was a bit worried that something like this could potentially happen here, although I didn’t think there would be anything like this to happen here ever,” Van Orden said.

“I wasn’t super worried, I mean, Turning Point USA was supposed to happen later, I think it starts at 6:30, and so with classes being earlier in the day, I wasn’t super concerned. On top of that, they have a lot of security,” Miller said.

“There’s always the assumption and hope that this wouldn’t happen here, our school is a safe school, but I think just hearing that bomb go off just showed that this can happen anywhere, and it’s just a lot of unease, given other shootings and violence happening around the country right now,” Widman said.