Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Units, campus develop, fine-tune emergency plans

Register for emergency notification

Students and faculty and staff members are requested to log on to the emergency system Web site at emergency.illinois.edu and enter their contact information. Each person can enter up to three e-mail addresses and two text-message addresses. Users can change, add to or delete their contact information at any time.

The Office of Campus Emergency Planning is requesting that facility managers from units across the Urbana campus collaborate with the office in developing and testing unit-level and campuswide emergency preparedness plans.

On Jan. 9-10, 91 facility managers from across campus met with OCEP during a series of meetings at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to discuss new policies, plans and ongoing projects related to emergency preparedness.

Resources

The Office of Campus Emergency Planning will assist units with developing and testing Emergency Operations Plans. Contact Kip Mecum at 333-1491 or e-mail emergencyplanning@ad.uiuc.edu. Templates to assist units in developing response plans for various types of emergent situations are available on the OCEP Web site. The Emergency Response Guide for Faculty, Staff and Students flip chart also is available on the Web site or copies can be requested by calling 333-4660 or e-mailing dpscomments@ad.uiuc.edu.

“We wanted to reach out to the facility managers to say they’re extremely important in terms of emergency planning because they have a huge amount of institutional knowledge about the various facilities on campus, and we need to establish good communications with one another,” said Kip Mecum, director of emergency planning in the Division of Public Safety. “They can provide us with information that will help speed along some of the projects we currently have under way. Our plan is to meet with them annually.”

OCEP’s current database of campus facility managers contains 157 entries. Units are encouraged to contact the office to update their information, Mecum said.

Among OCEP’s projects is a proposal approved and funded by Chancellor Richard Herman’s office to expand the distribution of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather radios to campus units. The UI plans to use the radios to broadcast messages over the NOAA/National Weather Service messaging system to the campus about non-weather-related threats or emergencies that have the potential to substantially disrupt campus operations. The radios also will help keep units apprised of the latest information about threatening weather.

An Interoperable Communications Plan for use during campus emergencies also is under development, and OCEP is building a database of tornado shelters around campus that will be available on the OCEP and Division of Public Safety Web sites.

During 2007, OCEP developed an Active Threat Template as an addendum to the Campus Emergency Operations Plan. The OCEP Web site, www.ocep.uiuc.edu, also contains a Tornado Preparedness Template, an Evacuation Template, and other updated emergency preparedness documents for units to download and customize in developing their own emergency response plans.

The OCEP will assist units with developing/updating their emergency operations plans and with reviewing and testing those plans through tabletop or live exercises. At least 65 units on campus have developed or are developing Emergency Operations Plans for their facilities, Mecum said.

The OCEP is exploring the possibility of establishing campus lockdown procedures in the event of threats such as active shooters. Many universities have developed lockdown procedures to protect students and faculty and staff members as a result of incidents such as the shootings at Virginia Tech in April 2007. Campus officials are exploring whether lockdown procedures would be feasible at the Urbana campus, and if so, how to best approach it, said Todd Short, a UI police officer and member of the campus Crisis Intervention Team.

University Laboratory High School developed an Active Threat Response Plan that includes lockdown procedures and tested the plan last spring, Short said. “It went very well. They simplified a plan that everybody could use to secure students and faculty and staff members in a timely manner taking into account the physical layout of the building and the internal and external locking systems. In a very short amount of time, they were able to secure all faculty and staff members by locking people into various rooms throughout the school.”

The week after Thanksgiving, administrative staff members in the College of Education and OCEP tested the college’s Active Threat Response Plan with an exercise. During a de-briefing following the exercise, the strengths and vulnerabilities of the college’s plan were discussed and additional security measures were put into place.

In early May, OCEP plans to conduct an exercise that will test the Infectious Disease Response Plan and will involve emergency planners from across campus.

This summer, the campus again will offer introductory level courses on the National Incident Management System, a standardized approach for handling critical incidents. Employees in positions that could be called upon to handle a critical incident that could disrupt campus operations or threaten health or safety are required to undergo the training, which is mandatory for all organizations that receive grants, contracts or other federal funding for preparedness activities. Short, who is one of only a few people in the U.S. certified as an Incident Command System instructor by the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, will lead the training.

The university recently put to the test a contract that university officials signed in December with BMS Catastrophe, a company specializing in commercial and industrial property damage restoration and disaster recovery services. Officials at the Chicago campus called upon BMS to assist with cleanup and smoke and odor remediation following a Jan. 19 fire that caused millions of dollars in damage at its College of Pharmacy.

BMS, which is based in Fort Worth, Texas, will supplement the disaster recovery services provided by UI staff members with specialized services such as protection of artifacts, data, collections and equipment; and mold and fungus control. The contract covers all three UI campuses, UI Extension offices and regional campuses.

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