Emergency notification system announced for Philadelphia region

Emergencies at a city, regional or perhaps national level can be better managed because of a partnership between city and suburban leaders, according to an announcement from the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Emergency Management last week.

On Friday, leaders in emergency management services announced a notification system that uses text messaging to spread directions for evacuation or safety plans.

The partnership launched a Web site at www.ReadyNotifyPA.org, where residents can sign up for the text message and email alerts or view possible threats. Additionally, residents can join the free service by texting a county code to 411911. Philadelphia residents use PHILA; BUCKS for Bucks County; CHESCO for Chester County; DELCO for Delaware County; MONTCO for Montgomery County.

It is similar to the emergency notification system that has been installed by Temple University and was first tested in February, though that system automatically includes a text message, an automated phone call and an email, to more comprehensively alert students and staff. That system is only for employees of or students at Temple.

Residents outside of the participating Philadelphia region can also request the warnings from ReadyNotifyPa.org. The automated service was established with $900,000 of federal funds, as first reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

This system is different than the already established city-wide effort called Alert Philadelphia, which is online at www.AlertPhila.com, and may be related to similarly named and designed ReadyPhiladelphia.org, though that was not confirmed in the brief release.

Participating residents could potentially receive a warning of an impending hurricane and directions for when and how to best evacuate, including advice on the best measures, methods and times to do so. Beyond weather, the system could be used for widespread crime or terror attacks.

The initiative is part of a comprehensive preparedness plan, which includes a detailed evacuation plan for a city of nearly 1.5 million with crowded suburban neighbors.

Christopher Wink can be reached at cwink@temple.edu.

Advisers work to heal NIU

“When a tragedy like this happens, it doesn’t just happen to a campus, it happens to higher education,” said Theresa Powell, vice president of Student Affairs.
After the Valentine’s Day shooting at Northern Illinois University, a call went out across the country asking for counselors. Powell said Temple was delighted to help.
“During a time like this you want to reach out,” Powell said. “I kept saying, ‘Is there anything I can do?”

Dr. John DiMino, director of Tuttleman Counseling Center, said that Temple sent two counselors to the NIU campus.

“There were a couple of others who wanted to go, and we’re balancing it with other commitments people have,” DiMino said.

Dr. Denise Walton, one of the Temple counselors who went to NIU, declined to be interviewed because of a waiver she signed through NIU.

“I signed a waiver saying that I would not talk about my experience outside of NIU, and I want to respect the grieving community of students, faculty and administration there,” Walton said in an e-mail.

The counselors arrived in Chicago last Saturday afternoon and returned to Philadelphia Tuesday night. DiMino said more than 100 colleges and universities sent counselors.
All of the counselors were given training at an orientation, and then were present at a memorial service, Powell said. The service was attended by students, administrators, faculty and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

NIU had a goal of having a counselor in every single classroom when students returned to classes last Monday, said Ainsley Carry, the dean of students.
“The counselors sit in a classroom, and the instructor will open up conversation, try to say, ‘This is what happened and let’s talk about it,’” Carry said. “Some of these students lost best friends, roommates and girlfriends or boyfriends.”

Carry said that many of the counselors came from the state of Illinois and the surrounding states.

“Schools usually average about eight to 10 counselors. If something like that happened here, we would have to send out a call to the local area,” Carry said.

Student Affairs is a “very helping profession. When it comes to students, that’s all of our priorities,” Carry said.

DiMino said that Temple has been doing trauma response for about 10 years and that counselors are trained in critical incidence stress management and psychological first aid survival.
At least once a semester Campus Safety Services and administrators meet to talk through various scenarios, such as car accidents, student injuries and active shooters.

“We find out all of what needs to happen. We play out the scenarios and realize our strengths and weaknesses,” Carry said.

“Students need to sign up for TU alert,” he added. “The key in emergency response is that everybody finds out information as soon as possible.”

At the end of the fall semester, 20 percent of the student body registered for TU-Alert, Carry said.

“It is critical that more students sign up,” Carry said.

“Temple as a university has done everything as humanly possible to do everything we can,” Powell said.

LeAnne Matlach can be reached at leannematlach@temple.edu.

New student paramedic group to patrol campus

After more than two years of planning and an “insane” amount of training, the students finally got what they wanted — bicycles packed with oxygen tanks and automated external defibrillators.

The Temple Emergency Medical Services organization is now riding alongside Campus Police to assess and treat student injuries.

The 10-member student EMS force began patrolling on Jan. 24 and is on duty Thursday and Friday nights from 7:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. Within each team of two or three EMS members, there is at least one state-certified emergency medical technician and a first responder.

Temple Police Capt. Denise Wilhelm said this medical experience has provided a new level of treatment for students.
“They’re a higher standard of caregiver than we are,” she said.

The EMS presence has also allowed Wilhelm to send fewer police officers to a minor medical incident.

“It frees up an officer to maintain high visibility on his route and maybe help out a pedestrian,” she said. “Some nights when things are really busy, if you have to send an officer for food poisoning you know you’re taking them away from other needs.”

Temple EMS students are wired to Campus Police’s radio system, but they may work with the Philadelphia Fire Department’s EMS teams if a patient is in more serious condition.

“You might have somebody that’s critically ill or injured and needs the help of the paramedics,” said Zachary Reichenbach, a first-year medical student and one of the four founding EMS students. “In that case, we’d be on the scene providing care and basic life support measures until EMS arrives.”

Temple EMS members are equipped to handle cases ranging from broken limbs and burns to alcohol poisoning and cardiac arrest.

“Earlier, we had a patient at the Liacouras Center who collapsed,” said Peter Seltzer, a senior entrepreneurship and environmental science major. “Two minutes later, we were able to be on scene and get her the medical attention she needed.”

To become an EMS member, students must take a 50-hour first responder course to learn how to initially assess and attend to a patient. While other universities offer the course for credit, the class Seltzer teaches is in addition to university coursework.

After passing the state first responder test, students also spend 16 hours in Temple Hospital’s emergency room. They must complete a four-hour radio communications course and a 32-hour International Police Mountain Bike Association course that teaches them to maneuver safely around campus.

Medical equipment on the bicycles weighs anywhere from 35 to 50 pounds.

“When the cops are zooming by us, don’t judge us,” joked Eva Cantor, a junior art history major. “They don’t have all that stuff on the pack.”

There are more than 200 campus-based EMS organizations in the nation, many of which are student-staffed. Many schools in Pennsylvania offer the service, including Penn State University, Villanova University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Temple EMS participants said they hope to increase its 10-person membership as more students complete their training requirements. They said they would like to send EMS members to stand by at large events like graduations, concerts or dances.

“We want to be more visible,” said Paul Grodziak, a senior architecture major. “We’d like to work more nights a week, Thursday through Sunday.”

EMS members said the organization was created to add to, not replace, Campus Safety programs.

“They’re in here every week talking to us,” Wilhelm said. “They’re part of us now, really. They’re a breath of fresh air.”

Mel McKrell can be reached at melissa.mckrell@temple.edu

Emergency alert network tested

On Valentine’s Day, students at Northern Illinois University witnessed yet another college shooting. According to the New York Times, a lockdown and notification system was put into effect immediately, similar to the TU-Alert system that university officials recently tested.

“I don’t know very much about their system,” said Temple communications director Ray Betzner, whose son was a student at Virginia Tech last year during the shootings on that campus in April 2007.

“There are similar systems that are being used at colleges and universities around the country. For instance, the University of Pennsylvania has the same system we do,” Betzner said.

With this recent rash of campus shootings and security breaches on Temple’s campus, administrators and Campus Safety Services are instituting extra security measures.

After the Nov. 1 assault in Anderson Hall last year, ID checks in lecture halls campus-wide, especially in Anderson and adjacent Gladfelter Hall, became tighter than ever. At the beginning of this semester, students also noticed locked bathrooms on upstairs floors of the towers.

“As far as the bathrooms, there were some that were secure prior to [the assault] and then others that we looked at and decided to secure them,” said Charles Leone, deputy director of Campus Safety Services. “We’ve just made a change that we’re going to have them open during the day because there’s a lot of free flow, there’s a lot of folks in the building. In the evening, we’re going to have keys accessible.”

Senior theater major Erin Ryan said she doesn’t think strict ID checks or locked bathrooms make too much of a difference.

“The only thing that I like that they changed is the new alert system that they’ve added in, which I think was more a result of Virginia Tech than the [sexual assault],” she said. “But they just tested it, and they’ll send you a text message to your cell phone. On a campus this big, it’s more effective.”

Betzner said the alert system works by first sending a text message notification, then calling the same cell phone with an automated notification message and then sending an e-mail.

He said that only 25 percent of the total population of Temple has signed up for text messages and phone calls.
“We want students to know they’re not going to get a text message or a telephone call unless they sign up for it through OWLnet,” Betzner said. “The e-mail will go out to everyone who has a ‘temple.edu’ e-mail address.”

In addition to the TU-Alert, Leone and Campus Safety Services executive director Carl Bittenbender said they are always looking for ways to make security on campus safer and more convenient.

“We look at everything, believe it or not, on a daily basis. We look at just about the whole picture of security, policing, everything from maps to just talking to folks and getting information from our Web site,” Leone said. “We’re always asking people to send us information. Anything we get, we take a look.”

Both Leone and Bittenbender said they’re also optimistic about Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey’s new crime fighting plan for Philadelphia.

“It’s good to get a fresh look,” Leone said. “We’re looking at anywhere possible to come up with the best practices.”
Bittenbender said he would not have let his daughter live on campus for the four years she attended Temple if he wasn’t confident about the security. Leone’s son will also be coming to Temple in the fall.

“It really is exceptional the amount [of security] that Temple provides,” Bittenbender said. “I feel good about this place.”

Morgan A. Zalot can be reached at morgan.zalot@temple.edu.

Safety First

Reality struck again Thursday evening.

And it struck hard.

With all of the fancy bells and whistles Temple has added to campus in recent year, it’s almost too easy for students to forget that this is still North Philadelphia.

But Thursday night’s assault was a devastating reminder of what can happen if you fall into a complacent mind state.

A 22-year-old female student was sexually assaulted in the hallway of Anderson Hall at about 7 p.m. by a clean-shaven, dark-haired white male, city police spokesman Lt. Frank Vanore said.

Fortunately, Temple instituted a new emergency notification service last week that is designed to inform all students and faculty members of any dangerous situations that may occur on campus.

Well, it’s about time.

Look, there have been plenty of high-profile incidents at several schools across the nation in the past couple of years. It’s simply astonishing that Temple hasn’t instituted a system like this prior to this month. The recent shootings at Virginia Tech and Delaware State must have sped up the administration’s process of selecting a system that would help inform students of catastrophic situations.

The emergency notification e-mail that was sent out to Temple students and faculty members Thursday night was an OK attempt at improving this situation. But, realistically, how many students actually opened the e-mail? The general consensus is that most students ignore most Temple e-mails, whether they are from the administration, departments or organizations, simply because they receive so much e-mail from the university that they don’t differentiate which ones are actually important.

Furthermore, how exactly is this system going to work? Granted, a sexual assault is an important incident for the Temple community to know about, but where exactly do you draw the line? Will the system inform the university of every single crime that occurs on campus? And what exactly justifies itself as an emergency?

Obviously, there are a lot of questions that still need to be answered. But Temple deserves credit for at least taking a step in the right direction.

It’s fantastic that Temple is continuing to establish a safer environment for its students and faculty. But this new system is far from sufficient in its current state.

We hope the administration will continue to tweak the system and pursue more options that will keep members of the university well-informed about what happens on campus.

It’s about time that everyone has a better idea, anyway.

Emergency notification sounds off

The new emergency contact system has now been installed throughout the entire university.

The system is called the MiR3 and it is a two-way notification system that will alert students and faculty in the situation of any campus-wide threat.

This alert will be disseminated through the university by e-mails, voice mails and text messages.

Although Temple’s Main Campus is one of the safest urban colleges in the country, associate vice president of communications Mark Eyerly said he is aware of the constant changing concerns of safety.

“We’re always continually evaluating our processes to see if there are things we can do to make it a more safe place,” Eyerly said.

This is the reason Temple, along with other universities such as the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University, has purchased the MiR3 for an undisclosed price.

At New York City’s St. John’s University campus in Queens, the same campus-alert system has proven to be effective.

Authorities were alerted on Sept. 26, 2007 when a masked man carrying a rifle entered St. John’s campus.

The school’s vice president then disseminated a campus-wide alert through text messages advising people to remain where they are or to get indoors.

The masked gunman was subdued by local authorities and then students and faculty were given the all-clear.

This system helped alert students and faculty to the situation keeping them free from harm.

Timothy O’Rourke, Temple’s vice president for computer services, said he is extremely adamant about having students register their contact information with the MiR3 system.

“This is an extremely important tool, and it does no good if you’re not signed up for it,” O’Rourke said.

Of the approximate 42,755 people attending Temple this semester worldwide, only 5,800 have registered with the system as of noon on Oct. 31.

Though this is most important for campus safety, it is also planned to be used to show school cancellations due to inclement weather and other unexpected reasons.

But with only such a small percent of students registering since the campus-wide email from Temple President Ann Weaver Hart, the positive effects of the MiR3 are extremely limited.

“It takes you 30 seconds,” O’Rourke said regarding the time it takes to register yourself for Temple’s new emergency notification system.

O’Rourke said he believes that until a much larger percentage of students and faculty register for Temple’s new MiR3 campus alert system, the university’s population will be at greater risk of an imminent threat without notification.

The first emergency notification was disseminated throughout Temple’s campus by an e-mail from Clarence Armbrister, Temple’s executive vice president, after a student was assaulted in Anderson Hall between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. Thursday evening.

The alert was issued at 12:25 a.m. on Friday, and over the span of the next 55 minutes, it was distributed to approximately all 42,000 e-mail accounts of Temple’s population.

The staffs at the Executive Office and the Communications Office were willing to make any statements regarding the assault that took place on Thursday evening, but O’Rourke and Armbrister are saying the systematic goal of MiR3 was a success.

“We’re happy it works as it was described,” Armbrister said. “We do plan to test it.”

The test will be using the text-messaging service, phone calls and e-mail to let students know the service is active, and it will say that it is only a test in the message to not cause a panic.

“We encourage staff, faculty and students to register on the system,” Armbrister said.

In the event of an immediate threat, the MiR3 system is the fastest way for all of Temple’s population to be alerted, Armbrister said.

“I didn’t associate that with any danger to me,” freshman elementary education major Tamara Golden said about the e-mail alert. “Nothing changed.”

After receiving the e-mail alert, Golden said she did not feel any safer being on campus.

“I didn’t really get consciously freaked out,” she said

Although Golden read the MiR3 system’s e-mail, the situation did not change for her.

“It will let students know what’s happening,” said Golden, but said she does not think this will increase safety and security on Temple’s campus.

If you see something suspicious, do not wait for a message from the MiR3, officials say. Call Campus Police at 215-204-1234.

Daniel Weisbein can be reached at dweis@temple.edu.