Students wonder why a campus safety alert wasn’t sent out.

New information is coming out about how many explosive bottles were found outside a sorority house at Missouri State University. One of those bottles exploded Wednesday at Gamma Phi Beta. A woman was burned from the chemical contents.

A third bottle was found in the alley behind the sorority house. All of the bottles are being tested to find out what chemicals were inside.

Firefighters call what happened an explosion. The question that many students have is why they didn’t hear about it from their university.

“We talk about current events in my classes and that’s the first thing we talked about. A lot of kids didn’t know,” said MSU student John Adams.

MSU student Madeline Phillips feels the same way.

“I get campus alerts, not every day, but quite often around the Springfield area. The fact that something happened on Sorority Row and nobody knew about it — yeah, it’s weird,” she said.

Madeline Phillips’ roommate happens to be a Gamma Phi Beta. That’s how she found out about the explosion.

“She was scared. It could have been somebody in the house for that matter or if somebody had not finished their plan could have come back that night,” said Phillips.

Two weeks ago, a safety alert went out to students because shots were fired off-campus at a nearby restaurant. But, campus officials won’t say why a safety alert didn’t go out for this incident.

Jay Huff, assistant director of Safety and Transportation, told us to speak with MSU Chief of Staff Paul Kincaid. He declined our request for an interview, but did direct us to the university’s Safety and Transportation website. It lists the requirements that campus officials must have before issuing a Missouri State Alert. The second bullet point is a security alert. That’s why many students question why they never got one.

“Why don’t we know about these kinds of things? Why aren’t we in the know about things that happen to actual students instead of people just close by?” asked MSU student Christa Baver.

Fire Marshal Phil Noah says, at the very least, students should be have told what was happening.

“Let students be aware. If you see this, report it to security and then they’ll notify the right people who will look at it and see if indeed it’s another issue or just something discarded as a plastic bottle,” he said.

Noah says not knowing can cause more harm than good.

“That was probably the biggest problem. The people who found, it didn’t know what they found. The chemicals in it, is what caused the injury. Not knowing what they’re dealing with, they thought it was trash,” said Noah.

In the meantime, students are left wondering what’s going on.

“Are they just afraid to admit that happened, because they don’t want to admit that something like that could happen at Missouri State University?” asked Baver.

“Even if nobody was caught, it’s just really fishy nobody has come out and said what’s going on,” said Phillips.

Fire officials are also going to test the bottles for DNA to see if there’s any evidence that might lead them to the explosives’ builder.