The only sound on campus was the breeze rustling leaves outside a trio of brick dormitories known at Roanoke College as the Sections.

Police, firefighters and yellow caution tape that circled the building the day before were gone.

Even the TV news crews packed their vans and left.

Across the street, worshippers emptied the campus chapel at midday, marking the end of a conference where one among them was pronounced dead.

One day after an apparent carbon monoxide buildup in the dorms sent more than 100 people from a Lutheran conference and a college-prep program to area hospitals, a sense of calm settled on the Salem campus.

After a church service ending the three-day Power in the Spirit Lutheran conference, attendees wished one another safe travels and headed home.

Teens from the six-week Upward Bound college prep program will return to campus -- albeit to a different set of dorms -- after a planned weekend at home ends today.

After returning Friday and attending a worship service remembering Walter Vierling, college president Sabine O'Hara caught a noon flight Saturday and traveled to Fargo, N.D., for her son's wedding.

Vierling, 91, may have died from the leak that was discovered early Friday.

The events that happened on campus were tragic, everyone agreed. But consensus also favored something else: that in its time of crisis, college staff to emergency and medical crews to those displaced from the dorms handled the situation professionally.

"You don't ask for a situation like this, but we know our emergency procedures work," O'Hara said during a Saturday morning news conference.

Since word of the emergency broke, college spokeswoman Teresa Gereaux said the campus received support in the form of phone messages from alumni across the country and across the city. She also said Power in the Spirit attendees who moved Friday into the campus' newest dorms -- Caldwell, Allegheny and Ritter, dubbed CAR -- were calm and understanding.

"There's a lot of gratefulness because we're all OK," Donna Broadstreet of Pulaski said after a campus security officer escorted her into the closed Sections to collect a forgotten pillow.

Another woman heard a media report calling the scene "chaotic," yet she said it was anything but. She said her daughter in Brooklyn, N.Y., heard about the leak, called the college and got in touch with her mother.

Meanwhile, a Friday evening service was already on the agenda at the Power in the Spirit conference. But part of the event was spent remembering Vierling, a retired pastor from Pearisburg.

Many found peace in the fact that Vierling died among people in a place he loved -- after a Thursday night service that included communion.

"It was wonderful," Norfolk resident Joann Krumm said of Friday's service. "Something like this brings people closer."

The trio of dorms known as the Sections will remain closed as an investigation continues on the cause of the leak. Although no carbon monoxide detectors were in the building -- and are not required -- Gereaux said the college will consider making changes, perhaps by adding devices connected to fire alarms in buildings.