Concern for the safety of students, faculty and staff of ETSU was the main cause for the closing of the ETSU campus, said President Paul Stanton.
“I was worried that if we had an emergency of any kind, we would see 14,000 people having to leave campus in a hurry,” he said. “At 11 o’clock (Tuesday) morning, we didn’t really know what would happen.”
Stanton described Tuesday’s events as “a situation the likes of which no one has ever seen before” and stated that he was glad that “nothing more really happened.”
With the events going on in New York and Washington, D.C., students and professors would have had trouble concentrating had classes went on as planned, Stanton said, adding that the most productive thing to do was to allow them to go home and watch the news.
About 10 years ago, this area of Northeast Tennessee was a prime target zone for attacks of this nature based on some of the factories and production centers in the area such as Nuclear Fuel Services in Erwin, Eastman Chemical Corporation and Holston Defense in Kingsport, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
Stanton acknowledged the fact that ETSU could possibly have been targeted for some kind of attack on Tuesday.
“With ETSU being one of the largest and most visible targets in the area, there could have been some kind of threat, not necessarily from an international terrorist, but from what I call `coattail riders’ just wanting to cause problems,” he said, noting a bomb threat that occurred in Nashville on Tuesday.
In addition to the closing of ETSU, several local businesses closed, including the Mall at Johnson City.
“There was just too much chaos going on,” Stanton said.
Stanton also mentioned his pride in the students of ETSU, saying that he had been receiving phone calls from members of the community bragging on the turn out of ETSU students in donating blood and showing support for the victims in New York and Washington D. C.
“I’m very impressed with the outpouring of the students and the faculty and staff,” he said. “They are really pulling together.

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