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Katrina: What Can We Do to Help; This Time and the Next?

8/31/2005

Can you just imagine these scenarios on your own campus? Wouldn’t you like to know that if you can find Internet access you can also find a community of people from other campuses--all disciplines and departments--ready to lend advice, or maybe even equipment or labor?

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has a Disaster Resistant Universities program, where you can download a how-to guide that collects the experiences of six universities as they dealt with disasters. But there is no live interaction available there.

Looking at another resource, let us hope that the IT staffers along the Gulf Coast followed these steps, or something like them, in preparation for Katrina.

The SCUP-Katrina list is a start and I bet it will prove to be useful to connect expertise and resources to affected institutions. But it’s the same technology we used four years ago! We need more and better. Think floods, earthquakes, tornad'es, hurricanes, terrorist attacks. It’s truly amazing that a Lyris-based email discussion list (Thanks, University of Michigan!) is the best we can do in 2005, and implemented after-the-fact.

We need a constantly-on higher education disaster communications center with links to knowledge resources, agencies and other institutions that can help, and an active subscriber base using email and postings to share needs and available assistance. The folks in IT are the people with the expertise and resources to build it.

Who’s going to?


About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

Cite this Site

Terry Calhoun, "Katrina: What Can We Do to Help; This Time and the Next?," Campus Technology, 8/31/2005, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=40475

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