When a crisis, incident or accident occurs, there’s usually a system in place that helps inform citizens of the danger. Our city has Alert D.C. AU has RAVE alerts. These alerts are designed to, well, alert students of the goings-on in a situation so students know what to do in the event of an emergency. Last Wednesday, students who were signed up for RAVE alerts received three messages within a span of half an hour describing an incident that sounded like the next Three Mile Island. In reality, the incident was akin to a minor laboratory goof-up with a chemical as harmless as “table salt,” according Chemistry Laboratory Director Jane Ferguson. Also note that the alert was sent more than an hour after the incident.
Was it necessary to send out such an alert, especially after it was sent an hour after the building was evacuated? Though Public Safety’s (one of the two departments authorized to send the alerts) policy is to wait for all the details of the incident before sending out an alert, it took them almost an hour after the alarm went off to ascertain the situation. In emergency situations, time is of the utmost importance, and any delays can be costly. Though this situation posed no threat to the campus community, if a dangerous situation were to occur, we would hope for a much faster response time.
Was the wording of this alert necessary? Not at all — the “dangerous chemical spill” was a minor chemical vapor that set off an alarm and posed no viable threat to students and faculty in the building. RAVE alerts are based off templates, which can be useful in sending out an alert quickly, but harmful if they misstate or overstate a situation. In this case, the template system did more harm than good — heaven forbid you knew anyone in Beeghly at that time and had a minor heart attack over a text message.
After the incident, Public Safety revised its alert system to better reflect individual situations. But the fact remains that Chemistry Department officials and Public Safety officials were not effectively communicating.
Yes, their main goal was to evacuate the building, but other universities have been criticized (and even fined) for not effectively implementing an emergency message system in a time of crisis. Though last week’s incident hardly qualifies as a crisis, if AU wants to have an effective emergency message system in place, it needs to revise its system so as to get out an accurate message quickly.
