USU graduate present at Boston bombing
As the nation mourns the tragic events at the Boston Marathon last week, one USU alumnus knows firsthand the turmoil the events created.
Jan Marie Andersen, an astronomy Ph.D. student at Boston University and a 2007 graduate of USU was at the finish line volunteering as a traffic controller with the ham radio team.
“They have buses that go through the race and they pick up runners that can’t finish the race for whatever reason,” she said. “I would direct the buses to the medical tent.”
Andersen said she was waiting for a bus to arrive when she heard the explosions. The first thing she did was grab her cell phone and text her mom.
“I sent the text and then my phone died as soon as I sent it,” she said. “All of my friends that knew I was volunteering and knew I was working at the finish line were trying to get a hold of me, but my phone was dead.”
Janette Andersen, Jan Marie’s mother, was worried sick as any mother would be. She said she was more than relieved to receive the text that let her know Jan Marie was okay.
“My daughter has been all over the world and this was the first time I have ever panicked,” she said.
Jan Marie Andersen said emergency personnel were quick to respond right after the explosions.
“The cops that were working with me just took off running towards where the sound came from,” she said.
Jan Marie Andersen said people kept asking her what was going on, but her official volunteer status kept her from answering many of them.
“I couldn’t really say anything,” she said. “I couldn’t even like chat with them because I had the official volunteer jacket on. People would have taken what I said as official.”
She waited around wondering what had happened for about five minutes before remembering she still had her radio.
“I switched frequencies to the net control frequency that the medical people were using and it was chaos,” she said.
Jan Marie Andersen said she listened to people on the radio talk about fatalities and demand every medical volunteer grab a wheelchair and come to medical tent A.
“It was kind of eerie listening in to all of this chaos and not really being involved because I wasn’t working at the medical tent,” she said.
Jan Marie Andersen said her job of directing traffic suddenly got a lot more complicated when the emergency vehicles started showing up.
“Instead of being one bus every 10-15 minutes, it was just this wave of ambulances coming in and out,” she said.
Jan Marie Andersen said holding up the pedestrians was the most difficult part of the task.
“I don’t understand why people don’t realize not to cross the street in front of a vehicle with a siren, but they don’t,” she said.
Janette Andersen said she feels that although the emergency personnel are heroes, the citizen volunteers are even bigger heroes.
“They aren’t usually expecting it and they don’t always know the risks,” she said.
After the initial chaos the evacuations began, Jan Marie Andersen said there were lots of volunteers present to direct the crowd, but most of them didn’t know what to do. That is when the ham radio became a handy tool.
“Since we had the radios, we had this network across the areas so we could talk to one another,” she said.
Over the radio, Jan Marie Anderson was told to find the bus coordinator and get the buses off of the street.
“I was thinking, who is the bus coordinator?” she said. “But I found him.”
The explosions were at about 2:50 p.m., but Jan Marie Andersen said she stayed at the scene for nearly four hours afterward assisting with whatever was needed.
“I ended up staying until around 6:30,” she said.
Everybody in the Boston area was on edge in the days that followed the explosions, Jan Marie Andersen said.
“People were having a hard time absorbing it all,” she said.
There was even a report of a suspicious package outside her building at Boston University.
“They had blocked off the road in front of the building,” she said. “There were like eight police cars, and they brought a bunch of dogs, like the bomb-sniffing dogs.”
The whole Boston area was put on lockdown Friday, Jan Marie Andersen said.
“I woke up to like a bunch of text messages from friends and from my school emergency system,” she said.
Jan Marie Andersen and her roommate decided it would be a good idea to lock the outside door to their apartment building.
“I was too scared to do it myself, so she said she would go with me,” she said. “I was like, ‘Yes, because two of us in our pajamas can stand off an armed bomber put together.'”
Jan Marie Andersen said she was amazed at how long the lockdown lasted.
“When I first heard it was happening I thought it would be like a couple of hours,” she said. “Then it just drug on and on and on. It was a long day.”
– ashlyn.tucker@aggiemail.usu.edu