The East Lansing Fire Department responded to the scene to assist in assessing the situation, according to department officials. Ingham County Hazardous Materials (HAZMAT) officials said they were not involved in the response as of Monday morning.

Students and staff were evacuated from Wells Hall classrooms and all students are urged to avoid the area until further notice.

“This was done out of an overabundance of caution,” said MSU Department of Police and Public Safety Deputy Chief Chris Rozman. “We do not believe there to be any threat to the community at this point or anything like that. Our goal, our mission is to ensure the safety of the community. And that's what we're doing here today.”

Due to the size of Wells Hall, personnel decided to evacuate the entire building, Rozman said.

When asked if investigators had an idea about what chemicals were in Wells, Rozman said they are in the early stages of identifying the substances. The building will be closed "for most of the day," he said.

"We know that that's impactful to our students and everybody who's coming to the building that works in the building that may have classes or exams," Rozman said. "So, we did work hard to get that information out very quickly after we identified that, after we located that chemical point to put a time frame on it."

Students were evacuated without their belongings, so police officers gathered students’ personal belongings and brought them out to them.

Computer Science senior Justice Yin said he taking a final exam when the building’s fire alarms went off at the same time he received the text message and email from MSU.

“At the start of the exam, we received a strange email from the university,” Yin said. “We weren't really sure if it was like a fire drill or something. They were just like, keep caution, but then the alarms went out, so we quickly evacuated.”

 Human Biology sophomore Ben Vigier was in his French class, also taking an exam, when the alerts went  out. 

“We think that we should be released from the final because all of us are speaking about what's on the final right now,” Vigier said.