UPDATED: North Bergen High School briefly goes on lockdown due to ambiguous threat

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North Bergen High School briefly went on lockdown this afternoon due to an ambiguous telephone threat. North Bergen High School

By John Heinis/Hudson County View

“Police received a phone call where someone said they were at the Exxon [gas station] across the street and he was going to go into the high school and do something,” North Bergen Superintendent of Schools Dr. George Solter told Hudson County View.

Solter said the man then called back stating he was already inside the high school. Around 1 p.m., the school was then placed on lockdown and police did a sweep of the building, he added.

Solter also said that after police did a sweep of the building, Chief Robert Dowd confirmed that everything was safe and there were no strangers or other threats detected in the building.

“Police are following up on leads to find the person who called. We felt it wasn’t credible since the person didn’t give any specifics, but we went into lockdown anyway as a precaution. Our students are trained for disaster drills, we do these drills all the time and it worked wonderfully.”

The superintendent added that the lockdown lasted for about 40 to 45 minutes and that parents would be receiving a call to notify them of the situation.

Additionally, North Bergen police are currently investigating who made the phone calls to the school, officials said.

Solter further stated that he believed Union City encountered a nearly identical set of circumstances, but Union City officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Dowd later said that the caller threatened to cause “an explosion,” but declined to get into the particulars of what he said.

On their Facebook page, the North Bergen Police Department referred to a series of calls to the Hudson County 911 center as bomb threats to the North Bergen and Union City High Schools.

“At approximately 12:54 p.m. the Hudson County 911 call center received upwards of nine telephone calls calling in bomb threats to both North Bergen and Union City High Schools,” the post says.

“The threats were deemed not to be credible after Officers conducted extensive sweeps of the entire North Bergen High School campus and surrounding streets.”

Union City police acknowledged “a reported threat” that was not credible, but all public schools were being dismissed as a precaution.


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