The Virginia Tech shootings have provoked worries nationwide about workplace and school violence and prompted calls to local employee assistance programs and the Honolulu police.

As President Bush yesterday directed federal officials to conduct a national inquiry into how to prevent violence by dangerously unstable people, local firms that help companies deal with problem workers reported a flurry of calls in the past few days from managers concerned about similar incidents here.

One company said a suicidal worker who owned a gun had threatened another employee.

The police fielded a call from a University of Hawai'i-Manoa instructor who wanted to file a report about someone on campus.

"They are afraid that something like what happened in Virginia can happen here," said Martina Svoboda, operations coordinator for Hawaii Employee Assistance Services. Svoboda reported receiving a high number of calls this week from companies requesting workplace violence training.

"We also had a call from a company where an employee was suicidal and already had a gun," Svoboda said. The company had sent the employee home, something it shouldn't have done because that's where the gun was. Police were called and sent to the home and counseling help was obtained for the worker.

TOPIC OF RADIO ADDRESS

The White House said yesterday that the departments of Education, Justice and Health and Human Services will travel the country to meet with educators, mental health experts and state and local officials, and report back with recommendations.

They also will work with the Virginia Tech community to better understand what might have led a troubled student to kill 32 people on the campus and then commit suicide.

This was to be the topic of Bush's weekly radio address, taped yesterday and set to air today. The White House took the rare step of making the text of the address available for publication before its Saturday delivery.

"We can never fully understand what would cause a student to take the lives of 32 innocent people," Bush says in the address. "What we do know is that this was a deeply troubled young man, and there were many warning signs. Our society continues to wrestle with the question of how to handle individuals whose mental health problems can make them a danger to themselves and to others."

Hawai'i isn't immune to such incidents. In 1999, a gunman killed seven people at the Xerox building. In 1996, a disgruntled former worker burst into an office on Sand Island Road, shot a manager and held a former co-worker at gunpoint before dying in a hail of police bullets.

STUDENT COUNSELING

At UH-Manoa, there have been a slight increase in referrals to the school's counseling and student development center since the Virginia Tech shootings, spokesman Gregg Takayama said. While students traditionally seek out counseling because of finals and other stress at this time of year, there could be a rise because of what happened at Virginia Tech, he said.

Takayama said he wasn't aware of anyone reporting immediate threats but said there have been incidents where a faculty member felt there has been belligerent behavior. He said police were called to the campus by an instructor on Wednesday who reported anxiety about a student she'd had a problem with five years ago and had resurfaced on campus this week.

HPD spokeswoman Michelle Yu said the department encourages people to call 911 if they witness behavior that may pose a threat to them or someone else. She said the department also provides officers who give safety talks to groups and that a school had telephoned this week to request such a presentation to staff and students.

Carey Brown, a general partner of Honolulu-based Employee Assistance of the Pacific, said companies and individuals were calling her office seeking a variety of things, from counseling about their own worries to requesting briefings on prevention of violence. The attention given the Virginia Tech incident prompts some managers to call because they may be worrying about a certain worker, she said.

"When there's a tragedy like this it heightens everybody's anxiety as well as awareness," Brown said. She said each problem worker case is different and that companies should have employee assistance programs so help is available when needed.

Some of the warning signs in Seung-Hui Cho's past include two stalking complaints against him and a psychiatric hospital visit in which he was found to be a danger to himself.