Director of Security Terry Gorman ordered Carnegie Hall to be closed just before 11 a.m. last Friday on the advice of the St. Paul Fire Department’s Hazardous Materials Response Team (Haz Mat) after Sociology Department Coordinator Christine Scarlett discovered a “white, powdery substance” in the building’s stairwell. Gorman, Scarlett and the hazardous materials team were afraid that the powder might be anthrax or some other bioterrorist agent.
“Eight weeks ago this would not have been anything,” Gorman said, “but we didn’t feel we could just leave it with the climate there is today.”
When Gorman was first alerted of the powder’s presence he immediately ordered that Carnegie’s air-handling system be shut down and the stairwell closed off-the college’s standard response plan. Then he called the hazardous materials team and, despite the fact that the college had received no threats they advised him to evacuate the building and sent over a team to investigate.
Gorman said that the fire department had already received five other reports of “suspicious substances,” on Friday morning by the time he called at around 10 a.m..
The Hazardous Material team entered the building and took a sample of the powder. According to Gorman, they gave the college “special masks and gloves” and told them to thoroughly clean and disinfect the stairwell, which they did.
Some classes were cancelled, but many others were relocated to other buildings on campus, and Carnegie was reopened at 3 p.m. that same afternoon.
There is no way to be sure exactly what the substance was, because Haz Mat will not test the sample they took unless people who were in the building that morning actually start becoming ill. However, a group of anthropology students who were in Carnegie the night before have reason to believe that the “white, powdery substance” spilled in the stairwell may have been confectioner’s sugar.
The students had been watching a showing of The Raiders of the Lost Ark sponsored by the Spradley Society, the Anthropology department’s student organization. Part way through the movie, Jenny Epstein ’02 alerted her fellow students that there was a large cache of brownies-two huge plates worth-leftover from a forum earlier that day, in Carnegie 006.
“We all bolted out of our chairs,” Emily Ireland ’02 said. “We were all in there wrapping them up in paper towels and carrying them back to the room.”
According to Jessica Smith ’03, each brownie was covered with a “quarter-inch-thick” layer of powdered sugar.
“I got covered in powdered sugar just from carrying one of them back to the room,” Epstein said.
After the movie was over, the students left the rest of the brownies in the anthropology lab, so that their classmates could partake of them the next day.
Gorman said that the janitor in charge of Carnegie had cleaned the building thoroughly-including all of the powdered sugar leftover from the Spradley Society and their brownies-the night before.
However according to Brie Callahan ’03, a male Anthropology student, whose name she withheld, took a brownie from the Lab on Friday morning and accidentally dropped it on the ground on his way up the stairs, leaving a pile of powdered sugar.
Gorman said he wasn’t sure if the school would have to shut down a building every time an unidentifiable pile of white powder appeared somewhere on campus, but he did not rule out the possibility.
He wanted staff, students and faculty to remember that white powder is not just white powder anymore, and to be careful not to just spill something and leave.
“If you spill something, if you are the one dropping the donut dust or spilling the Coffeemate,” Gorman said, “just tell us. We’ll come clean it up.”
