7 Best Practices for Emergency Notification

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Mass Communication Technology

7 Best Practices for Emergency Notification

8/1/2007

By Dian Schaffhauser

After conferring with a campus PR representative, Loendorf's group pushed out a message about the site closure to subscribers, telling them to avoid the area. Understandably, the use of the service received a good deal of positive media coverage.

6) Pre-Define "Emergency," and Communicate It to the Community

A few weeks after the chemical spill, another incident arose on UNM's main campus, when an unidentified box was discovered in a parking structure. The city police arrived to detonate the package, which turned out to be an art student's project. "People on campus saw all the activity," says Loendorf, "and even students who worked in my department asked, ‘Why didn't you send a message?'" Soon after, an article in the Albuquerque Journal, "UNM Doesn't Sound Alarm Over Box," examined why the school hadn't used the new emergency notification system.

The incident spurred acting President David Harris to broadcast a campus message three days later, clarifying when the new notification system would be used. "The UNM Alert e-mail and the textmessage system are used only when the safety of the entire campus, or a large portion of it, are threatened," the message states. "UNM Alert and the textmessage system are not and have never been intended to be used when an incident is isolated, impacts a small area of campus, and poses no threat to safety.... The last thing we want to do is inundate people with alerts that don't mean anything to them. When the real alert comes, we fear that they won't respond or will not respond quickly enough. We do not want this system to become a nuisance, because the real danger will be people failing to react."

"Many institutions will be struggling with those sorts of issues," Loendorf maintains, adding, "Technology can [push out emergency information] very quickly. But it's how you use that technology to the best advantage, that is really open for debate."

7) Layer Your Approaches to Communication

Jay Gruber, a major with the University of Maryland Department of Public Safety, remembers well Sept. 24, 2001. A tornado ripped through campus, killing two students. "Prior to that day, there was no way to quickly alert our campus community to any problem," Gruber says. And "there was no way of knowing that bad weather was coming: We did not have NOAA [National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration] weather radios; we are not on the NOAA/[National Weather Service] system."

The tragic event pushed the university to grant Gruber the budget he needed to purchase a subscription to WeatherData's SkyGuard (storm intelligence and comprehensive weather risk-management and monitoring system), as well as spend $75,000 for a siren system from Federal Signal, which included three mechanical sirens and a digital activation and monitoring program.