We suppose that Oregon State University officials and police shouldn't have been surprised with two of the responses to Tuesday's actual activation of its emergency alert system.

Officials said 28,350 people were informed via automated cell phone call, text message or e-mail about a police standoff at an old apartment house on "Greek Row" at 25th Street and Harrison Avenue. (You can listen to the actual message at reporter Kyle Odegard's blog, http://www.gazettetimes.com/gtblogs/kyle_odegard/ and read a full account in our page A1 articles.)

A few glitches were predictable.

Some people (mostly students) who received the call on their cell phones promptly called back.

The result, according to Oregon State Police Lt. Jeff Lanz of the campus OSP office, was, "We were inundated, overwhelmed with calls." Some people hadn't picked up the call in time; others just wanted more information about what was happening.

Lanz said he activated the system three hours after the standoff started because by then it was clear that it would not end without some forcible police action.

But the biggest glitch was that many people, upon receiving the message, took it as an invitation to flock to the scene - the opposite of what authorities had hoped. We suppose that is to be expected. We live in a spectator world. Yet we were a bit concerned when one of our reporters, after returning from the stand-off site, said, "It's a party out there," referring to the mood of onlookers.

Let's recall the event, almost two years ago, that was a major impetus in partnering OSU, The Oregon Institute of Technology, Southern Oregon University, Eastern Oregon University, Portland Community College, the University of Portland and Central Oregon Community College to create the emergency alert system:

On April 16, 2007, at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., a text message sent to warn university personnel that two people had been killed in a dorm building around 7:30 a.m. mistakenly indicated that a suspect had been identified.

In fact, two hours later, 23-year-old English major Seung-Hui Cho calmly entered classrooms in an engineering building, armed to the teeth and carrying almost 400 rounds of ammo. During a horrific 12 minutes, before he killed himself, Cho shot to death 30 people and wounded 17. Another six were injured jumping from second-story windows to escape him. It was the worst single-shooter massacre in U.S. history.

Among the many "what if" debates started in the wake of the tragedy was one critical of the administration and police for not following up that first erroneous text message with other warnings. No one can be sure what difference it might have made.

We're relieved and grateful to police that Tuesday's stand-off on Greek Row ended peacefully, with no serious injuries. But we're wondering what could have been done to prevent the alert system from serving as an invitation rather than a warning.

We hope that OSU never is visited by a more serious incident. And we also hope that OSU students will help their classmates understand that an emergency alert message is not an invitation to a party.