Yeah… you all need a new principal, all right.
(This made my day)
Every state can have, and has had tornadoes, but I agree, Oregon or any other western state is not at high risk.
My state is far more likely to have tornadoes than Oregon and we have no public warning systems at all.
Not even Worcester? They get like 4 tornadoes a year.
Worcester just had a small tornado within the city proper this past August…and of course that notorious F5 in 1953.
But…no, no warning systems in place. Just like anywhere, they would announce something on the radio or TV if severe weather is imminent…but they could really use some sirens or something. They could be multi-use. You know, not just weather, but to warn people to take shelter when gang wars erupt. 
lol
YOU CAN’T LAUGH UNLESS YOU’RE FROM MASSACHUSETTS… Or Central Falls, RI
Where you’re from isn’t important, its whether you understand everything behind the joke. 
My mother said that in 10 years time, the neighborhood we’re in will be populated with all black people.
LOL!
Worcester and a few other cities around here have already had the demographics do an about face a while ago, only around here its mostly an influx of Puerto Ricans.
In the neighborhood I work in, every other car that goes down the road rides only 2 inches off the ground and has the same beats blasting from it. :lol:
When you Organs get a Tornado, You need Pepto-Bismol!
No really, we are more prone to gang fights, bank robbery’s, rapes, shootings ,ect. the anything. We SHOULD have a flash flood warning system tho…
LOLOLO :lol:
10/22/2014 - False bomb threat prompts school evacuation at approximately 11:40. After an interesting several hours we are dismissed to school at 1:50 so that we can leave at 2.
Very interesting in how differently this bomb threat was handled than the one in August 2012. Maybe post-Sandy Hook paranoia?
Not really a fire drill, but my university had a campus-wide lockdown today due to what happened on Parliament Hill. I was in class when we were notified of the situation by email. The lockdown was initiated around 11:00 a.m. and officially ended at 4:00 p.m. It was quite a long day, and I missed two midterms that I was supposed to take this afternoon.
That happened at my old middle school on Monday…
Was it a shelter-in-place, or were you hiding in the corner for 5 hours?
Was it a shelter-in-place, or were you hiding in the corner for 5 hours?
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I couldn’t even imagine…
We weren’t hiding in the corner, so it was more of a shelter-in-place situation. In my class, we closed the blinds and turned off the lights, as we were instructed to do in the email we received, but many people were still talking, so the noise levels were still somewhat high. All doors were automatically locked. Even though the lockdown ended at 4:00, most students (and the professor) in my class had left by 2:30 since we had been informed by a campus officer (at about 1:00) that we were allowed to leave the building if we wished to do so. However, he strongly recommended that we stay in class until the end. I don’t know what happened in other rooms and in other buildings on campus; I’m sure that elsewhere, people were hiding in a corner in silence. It was quite confusing at first since we were receiving conflicting reports regarding what we should do.
I believe that the situation was intended to be a true lockdown. The message we received instructed us to “[t]ake cover and remain quiet until authorities instruct otherwise”. Hiding in a corner, however, would be impossible in such a setting due to the large classes (we were approximately 120 students in my class when it happened). One of the main challenges in this situation is that live communication is extremely difficult due to the number of buildings on campus; many don’t even have PA systems, so giving instructions within a single building is already a complicated task. The only way to communicate was by email, through the university’s website, and with officers coming in each room to give instructions. Enforcing the lockdown procedures everywhere in this type of setting is also nearly impossible due to the size of the campus. The reality is therefore quite different from the ideal lockdown procedure planned by the university. There was no immediate danger on campus since the hazardous event did not happen on university grounds (and the university didn’t seem to be a target), but administrators decided to secure every building as the situation at Confederation Square and Parliament Hill was still unfolding, many details being unknown. The campus is located about half a kilometre from the scene, so I understand why the university wanted to prevent anything bad from happening on its grounds.
It was interesting to see what happens during a lockdown in an institution of this type. It’s quite different from what I experienced in high school, where monitoring such a situation is much easier for the administrators and for the authorities due to the smaller size of the building and a greater flexibility in terms of notification and communication. It must have been an absolutely chaotic day for our campus security officers.
Interesting take on things. The challenges you’ve mentioned can be dealt with, and even though you think you think there are some areas they did poorly in, it sounds like they did a decent job of locking down the university. They locked down the building, the classrooms, and you got some form of communication.
Communication is key, but those in charge usually have no idea what’s going on themselves or what to communicate when the situation is still fluid. This is by far the biggest obstacle in effective lock downs.
I know it seems inefficient to have an officer come to the classrooms, but if the PA system, email system, etc. is compromised then what? An active shooter could send everyone into an ambush, which is why you should always wait for an authority on foot to provide an all clear!
I sit in on a lot of webinars on this stuff and have been to a few mass notification training’s over the past 4-5 years. In my professional opinion most uni’s are under prepared to deal with these situations, and the industry as a whole doesn’t really have a set method or set of procedures on exactly how to deal with it. As you said, it gets complicated.
I have my fire drills in the user created fire alarm media and here is the link: Fire Drills For Everybody]Fire Drills For Everybody]
The security officers definitely did a good job when the lockdown was announced, as the buildings on campus were immediately locked and secured. I understand that they have limited resources in this kind of situation, so it’s impossible for them to ensure that absolutely everything is as it should be when the procedure is initiated. The problems I noticed mostly had to do with the way students and professors behaved: everyone knows what a lockdown is and how it is initiated, but many people don’t know what their responsibilities are and how they should act in this type of situation. Since my experience only reflects what I was able to observe in a single classroom, I don’t really have a global (campus-wide) perception of the situation.
The communication we received was certainly sufficient and adequate, but perhaps not ideal. From what I was able to observe, announcing an emergency via email, through text message, and on the university’s computers and website is quite effective when it comes to notifying people that a lockdown has been initiated: everyone in my class was made aware of the situation very quickly. However, these means of communication didn’t seem to be as successful in terms of instructing people how to react. The instructions in the messages were definitely clear, but many individuals simply ignored them (by leaving the building, for instance). It seems that people perceive the message as being “distant” when it is announced with these technologies. If the same message had been announced live, I’m sure the reaction would’ve been different.
Even though the security officers handled the lockdown well and seemed to know what to do, it must have been quite a challenge to manage the event since there are no drills to prepare them: the real situation, which happens to be an exceptionally rare occurence, is perhaps the only true practice they get. It is also their only chance to observe how people react in order to get an idea of the procedure’s strengths and weaknesses. As for the students and faculty members, the lack of drills means that no one is familiar with the lockdown procedure, and the challenges in communication contributed to make the situation even more confusing at the beginning. As I said before, we were initially getting conflicting reports from professors and security staff.
Also, just a quick clarification regarding your third point: I definitely agree with the idea that the end of a lockdown should be announced by an authority on foot, for the very same reasons you mentioned. In this case, however, I don’t know if relying on officers to go through the buildings simply to give everyone updates on the situation (they came to our classroom twice just to tell us that the lockdown was still in effect) during the lockdown is the most practical way to accomplish this, even though this method has advantages that I was able to observe. The building I happened to be in has no PA or voice-evac system: in this case, sending officers from room to room was indeed the only solution to communicate with people within the building and keep them updated during the lockdown.
The ideas that I have presented in this post probably have a bunch of issues that I overlooked, since the limited knowledge I have of emergency situations like this one is entirely derived from my own experience with lockdown drills in high school. Therefore, I can only compare the situation I witnessed this week with my past experiences. My knowledge of this week’s lockdown as a whole is also quite limited, so I probably missed some elements that could have changed my perception of the way it was handled.
This is a problem with any notification, even fire alarm evacuation. A (now deceased) Canadian lady named Guylène Proulx did some interesting research on peoples response to fire alarms, it’s worth looking up her work. The overall reality is though, when people hear a fire alarm, they look around see what other people are doing and investigate before they decide to evacuate. When you tell people to stay locked in a room for an undetermined time, when they have other plans, this behavior is probably amplified.
This is kind of the crux of the whole thing, it’s just so rare. We hear about the one or two incidents a year, but you’re talking about one or two out of thousands of universities, schools, etc. We’re spending billions to add some level of protection against a threat that statistically is improbable. Add in that we don’t really know how to protect against these things… eh. This stuff started being talked about after Columbine and the idea of lockdowns was implemented in schools and cameras were added, but procedures, methods, and planning wasn’t really pushed until Virginia Tech. By the time Sandy Hook rolled around, the school had actually taken the recommended security precautions and was doing everything properly outside of running a prison with high walls and guards. I’m not sure we’re any better off, we should have put that time and money and energy into mental health programs.