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Mass Communication Technology
7 Best Practices for Emergency Notification
8/1/2007
LAUGHING FROM THE PIER cont.
PIER also provides a measure of redundancy on many levels, she explains. Not only does it provide multiple ways of reaching the same person, but if the website, e-mail systems, or even electricity goes out in Wilmington, she can turn to colleagues at other UNC campuses to perform the necessary communications. In the event that the entire state becomes inaccessible, she says, she can call PIER via landline or cell phone and dictate the messages to be sent out.
Along with PIER, Lawson says her campus also has an e-911 system that provides detailed location information for public safety officers within or outside of the university. The school uses emergency call boxes, but is just now considering whether to enable those to broadcast messages to anyone within earshot of a call box (which can act as a loudspeaker).
Says Lawson, "Whether it's the web, various software packages, databases, PIER, or some other product that can help us get the word out and do it faster and easier—how blessed we are and how important it is."
"I kept saying phone calls and e-mail are last on a student's list," remembers Director of IT Services Paula Loendorf, "but they're out there texting all day long." At the same time, Loendorf had been seeking a mechanism for alerting members of the Emergency Operations Center when an event required their attention. The mode being used at the time consisted of the police dispatcher making individual phone calls. Loendorf began researching options, conferred with peers at other campuses, conducted some online research, and ultimately found Omnilert e2Campus, a hosted service that allows for simultaneous contact via mobile phone, pager, PDA, e-mail, website, RSS, and digital signage. When the university president heard about it, he called Loendorf and asked, "Can you really do that?" The IT director and her team had the solution up and running 24 hours after the paperwork was complete. Two days later, thousands of campus community members had subscribed to TextMe UNM and had entered their contact details—up to two cell phone numbers and two e-mail addresses per person. (To date, Loendorf estimates that about 5,000 people have subscribed; still just a fraction of the 34,000 students and 20,000 faculty and staff at the university. See "The Opt-In Quest".)
Inside of those first 48 hours, the Albuquerque campus was the site of a chemical spill (right behind the building where Loendorf's team operates), and the system was put through its paces with an unanticipated test run: Because campus officials feared it might be a volatile spill, they locked down the site.
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