All Clear After Yale Bomb Threat

Updated: The city announced via email and text message alert at 6:36 p.m. that ​“the Downtown Area has been deemed safe. All businesses and streets are open and back to normal.”

And at 6:52 pm, Yale Police announced that an ​“all clear was given and Yale’s campus is back to normal operations.”

See below for an earlier version of this story.

Downtown streets were closed and state police bomb-sniffing dogs arrived in New Haven late Friday afternoon to help investigate a threat on Yale’s campus.

A caller contacted the police non-emergency communications line at 1:51 p.m. ​“stating 40 bombs” were placed around the campus, according to an initial police communication. City and Yale police responded to the scene, along with firefighters. CT Transit was notified to re-route downtown buses.

“Please avoid the downtown area until further notice” while investigators check out the targeted buildings, Mayor Justin Elicker advised in a robocall to neighbors.

At a press conference held on closed-off High Street at 4 p.m., Yale Police Chief Ronnell Higgins and New Haven Police Chief Renee Dominguez said it would take at least a couple of hours, maybe longer to fully investigate the threat at seven targeted Yale buildings.

Until then, the area bracketed by York, Elm, College, and Chapel streets will be closed.

Officials cleared hundreds of students out of those and adjacent buildings Friday afternoon. At first they were reassembled on the upper Green. Later they were relocated to indoor locations to stay warm, Higgins reported.

Closed and evacuated buildings included the University Theater, Jonathan Edwards College, the Yale Art Gallery, Vanderbilt Hall, Bingham Hall, Welch Hall, Branford College, and Grace Hopper College.

“No buildings have been given the all-clear,” Dominguez said.

The caller ​“did not provide a reason” for allegedly planting bombs, Higgins said. He declined to go into further detail about what the caller stated. Dominguez said the dispatcher sought to keep the caller on the line as long as possible.

The state police arrived just before the press conference to help the city and Yale cops investigate the threat. Dominguez said the local departments do not have enough trained dogs on their own for the effort, so they needed back-up.

The FBI is assisting as well, Higgins said. ​“This is a unity of effort. We’re all in this together.”

Higgins said that updates will be posted to Yale’s emergency management website here.

Click here to watch the press conference.