With the large number of fire alarms being pulled each year in residence halls, students are choosing not to leave their rooms when an alarm sounds. While this poses a problem for false alarms, the implications would be far more serious in the case of other disasters like bomb threats.
Last month, 25 members of AU's Emergency Response Team met to test the emergency evacuation plan in a hypothetical emergency. Members of the ERT, Interim President Neil Kerwin and the vice presidents, sat down and went through the scenario "step-by-step," according to Julie Weber, executive director of Housing and Dining. The process, known as a table-top exercise, helps the team evaluate the school's level of preparedness.
"You get little pieces of information, just like you do in a real emergency, and then you discuss as a group what you would do, and it helps you identify what you would do if there are flaws in your plan," Weber said.
"When you take a job, you never expect to have to evacuate a building because of a bomb threat. You don't expect a major act of terrorism to happen five miles away from campus ... The university has always had emergency plan for things like weather, for major power outages," Weber said. "Of course when Sept. 11 came along, that changed the nature of plans that people had to have, and for the first time we needed a major evacuation plan that we had never had."
Since then, the ERT has been developing and perfecting an evacuation plan. The ERT directs about 250 full-time faculty and staff members around campus who compose the Emergency Assistance Staff, who have certain duties like directing traffic and administering first aid. EAS members are all volunteers and go through training at least once a year, according to Weber.
Residence hall assistants and directors are also trained to help in an emergency situation, however the training received on how to handle a terrorist emergency has been minimal, said a South Campus Resident Assistant who wished to remain anonymous.
"I know how to deal with every drunken situation you can imagine. Someone stumbles in drunk without an ID, someone's throwing up in your bathroom, someone gets in a fight with another resident. I know what to do with all of that," the RA. "I might deal with situations like that really often. How often am I forced to deal with terrorism? Maybe only once, which could be enough."
Some students say they know how to handle themselves, plan or no plan.
"I know what I would instinctively do," said Erin Kelley, a junior in the School of International Service. "As for AU, I've never heard of the evacuation plan. I didn't even know we had one."
When asked if she feels like she would know what to do in case of an emergency, Rene Kauder, assistant director New Student Programs, said, "It depends on what the emergency is. I guess if anything it's my own naivet?, coming to this area where the risk is greater. I probably should be more familiar with things."
Kauder, who has worked at AU since last June, feels the Office of Campus Life and AU are prepared to handle an emergency. "They've already forwarded information to us. This office has disseminated information to all staff members in the suite. We would all have tasks to do."
"We haven't been trained in large emergency evacuation at all," said the R.A. "I know what the average AU student knows. ... I've been trained in how to handle large groups of residents and how to keep them calm, but not in actual emergency procedure."
Weber said the disruption of an evacuation would be "rather extreme" on campus, which is one of the reasons no live simulation has been done yet.
Patricia Kelshian, executive director of Risk Management and Public Safety, hopes that AU will be able to stage an actual mock evacuation sometime in the next year.
"We have to get to a place where we're really comfortable with everything we have written, and where people understand what we're supposed to do," Kelshian said.
"We've been working on things a long time. You want to perfect that plan as much as you can before you go into a live drill," she said.
"In a perfect world I'd like to take AU and the surrounding agencies into a live drill," Kelshian said. "It's going to be a big deal to organize, but I think it will be well worth the time and effort that goes into getting ready for it."
Emergency plans also involve Sibley Hospital and other area universities. A few years ago, AU participated in one of Sibley's table top exercises, which involved a hypothetical emergency where five students fell ill in TDR. The plan involved getting the students to Sibley and then trying to identify what was wrong with them.
"We have a good relationship with [Sibley Hospital]," Kelshian said. "It was quite good to work with them."
All universities in the consortium have members on a rotating seat at the Joint Operations Command Center in downtown D.C. "A representative from one of the universities is always there," Kelshian said.
Consortium universities also circulate information about "where we could fit beds, what kind of space we have," in case one school would have to evacuate to another, according to Kelshian.
Weber explained that it's more likely to experience a lockdown than an evacuation.
"D.C. is an extremely hard city to evacuate," she said. "We've been told that in case of emergency, people should plan on staying in place, because you can't get the city evacuated."
For that reason the ERT has spent a lot of energy developing a Shelter-in-Place plan, which would be needed if AU ever needed to go into lockdown.
Most emergencies would most likely last eight hours, but AU has a stockpile of food that, with normal consumption, would last about three days. Weber said there are so many variables that could happen in an emergency, it depends entirely on whether or not people can leave their buildings or can still travel around campus.
"D.C. doesn't have very many shelters," Weber explained. "We basically become our own shelter. We've put a lot of energy into a shelter-in-place plan."
AU has only been evacuated once in the past 10 years, according to Weber.
On Sept. 13, 2001, Anderson Hall received several bomb threats, and the entire campus was evacuated.
"Two days after Sept. 11, it took us 25 minutes to evacuate the entire campus," Weber said. "We just went on instinct, and we did it really, really well. And that's part of what we count on."
Weber said that if AU ever needs to be evacuated again, that the best things for students to do is follow instructions and be prepared.
Although the full-campus evacuation plan has not been live tested, smaller portions of the plan, like the emergency telephone tree, have been tested. Both Kelshian and Weber hope to run a real mock scenario soon.
"Our plan is very, very good, and it's been recognized by a lot of places as a good plan," Weber said.
