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UK upgrades system for emergency warnings
ALERTS TO GO OUT VIA CELLS, TEXT MESSAGE, E-MAIL, PAGERS
By Beverly Fortune
BFORTUNE@HERALD-LEADER.COM
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Comments The University of Kentucky has a new emergency notification system that will allow students, university employees and others to receive warnings via text message, e-mail, cell phones, pagers and fax machines if there is an emergency on campus.
In a statement, the university urged students, employees and members of the public to sign up for the UK Alert system by going to www.uky.edu/UKAlert.
"UK Alert will complement and modernize our campus safety efforts, allowing us to better use technology to inform members of our camp's community during times of crisis," UK President Lee T. Todd Jr. said in a statement.
Security on campus, in Kentucky and other states, has gotten extra attention since the Virginia Tech shootings last April. Having a rapid notification system on campus is "clearly a new expectation on the part of students, of parents and staff," said Steven Healy, immediate past president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators.
There are 4,200 colleges and universities in the United States. "We are not anywhere near the saturation point" of such notification systems on campuses, said Healy, director of public safety at Princeton University, which purchased a system three weeks before the Virginia Tech incident. It has been used three times, Healy said, twice for bomb threats and, last week, for a major fire in a campus faculty housing project.
Christy Giles, director of the Office of Emergency Management at UK, said she had been looking at emergency notification systems for almost three years. "It was not because of Virginia Tech. We were looking way before that because it was another communication tool we wanted," she said.
UK's system will not be used except "when there is an immediate or potential threat to all or part of the campus community," she said. That can be a shooting on campus or catastrophic weather, such as a tornado. The system can also alert people in a specific building or section of campus if there is an emergency like a fire or hazardous-materials spill.
The high-speed notification system is one more way UK can quickly communicate with students, staff, faculty and the community in case of an emergency, Giles said. "We'll continue to use local TV and radio stations and e-mails through the UK system," she said.
UK will test the system once a semester to make sure it is functioning properly.
The university purchased the system from W.A.R.N. (Wide Area Rapid Notification) in Gallatin, Tenn. The installation cost was $30,000. Company president Don Griffis said his system can be integrated with classroom loud speakers, sirens or digital campus signs.
"We want to take a school's existing investment in emergency notification and make our system part of a unified response," he said.
He said W.A.R.N. could notify 10,000 people in 15 minutes using cell phones, text messages and e-mails, although factors such as time of day and phone volume could affect how quickly people are reached.
"If a system can reach 25 percent of the target audience in a critically unfolding event, human nature takes over," said Gary Margolis, police chief at the University of Vermont in Burlington. He was in Princeton, N.J., on Monday collaborating with Healy on a campus notification research project. "People will start calling and text messaging each other. But 25 percent is the tipping point."
The decision to send out an emergency alert on campus will be made by either the UK campus police or the Office of Emergency Management. The decision will not be made lightly, Giles said. A situation must pose "an immediate threat to their well being."
UK sophomore David Puthoff said the University of Akron, where he formerly was a student, had campus emergency notification.
"We had several bomb threats last semester and you knew exactly what was happening," said Puthoff. He received notices by text message.
UK sophomore Spencer Dillehay said he did not feel apprehensive about his safety on campus, but at Virginia Tech, "the loss of life could have been minimized with better notification. It would let people know if something was amiss."
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