According to a Hamilton Emergency Services representative, a message found on the wall of a school washroom resulted in the evacuation. The message was threatening enough to warrant everyone’s removal from the school.

“We take the safety and security of our students extremely seriously,” WDHS principal Helen McGregor said this week after confirming that “the school did receive a threat” Thursday afternoon. “We evacuated the school and followed all standard procedures and we called the police.”

Sgt. Terri- Lynn Collings, media relations officer with the Hamilton Police Service (HPS), said the message on the washroom wall indicated there was a bomb in the school. After a thorough search, conducted with the aid of school staff, police determined the threat was a hoax.

“There wasn’t anything found in the school,” Collings said, indicating that similar messages have been found in other schools, most often with the same outcome. “We’ve responded to these types of things before; it has been going on for years,” she said, adding that, typically, the perpetrators are simply “trying to get a response (from emergency personnel) and activity around the school.”

Since the incident occurred near the end of the school day, the students were held outside while members of the HPS investigated. Three police cruisers and two trucks from the Waterdown fire hall responded to the call.

Police gave the school the all clear at about 3 p. m. and the students were dismissed just a few minutes later than the normal end of the school day which falls at 2:45 p. m.

Buses, which had arrived earlier but were held back while the investigation continued, rolled up to the school entrance a few minutes late to take the students home.

John Verbeek, public relations officer with Hamilton Emergency Services (Fire), said firefighters responded to a call that came in at 2:12 p. m. informing them that alarm bells were ringing at the high school. When they arrived, they were told that the principal had activated the alarm because of a bomb threat, he added. From that point on, “it became a police matter,” he said.

Personnel on the fire truck and pump truck remained at the scene until 2:50 p. m. when it became clear there was no threat.