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Mass Communication Technology
7 Best Practices for Emergency Notification
8/1/2007
What did work in that emergency was SMS (short message service) for blasting out brief messages. As Lawson explains, while signal strength at the time was not high enough for voice communication, SMS uses the carrier wave of the signal, so text messaging could occur via cell phone, BlackBerry, and smart phone. In fact, that is how one-on-one communication was primarily handled in the immediate aftermath of the storm. "Text messaging was the primary method of communication between those of us who evacuated and the team that remained behind, including the president," says Lawson. "The president used text messages to frame his communications to the community, and our public relations staff posted the messages to our emergency website." He notes that it took about three days to extract the on-site team from New Orleans and receive cell phones from Cingular (now AT&T) with a different area code (one without jammed circuits).
Tulane was one of the few Gulf-area institutions hit by the storm that maintained information on an emergency website in order to keep students, parents, staff, and others up-to-date as events unfolded and decisions were made. As days passed, simple blog-like entries eventually expanded to fuller website postings, teleconferences, videoconferences, and e-mail exchanges.
Still, Lawson points out, "I think one of our dangers is that sometimes we tend to rely on the technology when, really, an older method might be more efficient. For example, bullhorns may actually notify people faster than SMS." Maybe that's why, when Lawson moved to WWU and began participating in the emergency planning committee there, he wasn't surprised or dismayed to find that the institution's modest emergency notification plans included the use of bullhorns, fire alarms, and even human runners whose job it was to quickly post notices on doors.
"An emergency often will dictate which modes of communication you will use, so you need to have as many modes available as possible," he says. "Those modes will change over time, over the duration of the emergency. If you have a modern fire alarm system, it could be that the first thing you want to do is trip the alarm, and then clearly explain over the alarm's speaker phone what you need people to do, or else send police cars with their loudspeakers around the campus, or send runners out.
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