Emergency Preparedness at the
University of Connecticut
Cooperative Emergency Management at UConn
is the Strength Behind the Bells and Whistles
By Lesley Dyson

Many important developments emerged in the United States on college and university campuses in response to the events of September 11, 2001, and, seven years later, to the Virginia Tech shootings. One of the most important impacts 9/11 and Virginia Tech had on higher education was to strip away the innocence academia had taken for granted that created a safe world for students to learn, to discover, and to aspire to their greatest abilities.
     
The impact of these dreadful events also awakened colleges and universities to the imperative need to reevaluate their individual emergency preparedness plans— to grow beyond the world before 9/11, a world that is not as safe, but with the strength of ongoing emergency management, a world that will readjust to the challenges ahead, and a world that will above all continually create a safe haven for students, faculty, and staff to thrive.
     
An important outcome to this distressing scenario is the increasing realization of the need for cooperation among colleges and universities, as well as with highly focused for-profit companies and non-profit organizations that support higher education, and with local, regional and national governments.
     
Cooperation is the strong thread that runs through the comprehensive ongoing Emergency Response Management Plan the University of Connecticut has developed to meet the difficult challenges that now face college campuses.
     
Like most of higher education in the United States, UConn has had many years to develop and perfect its critical incident response tactics. Also, like most of academia before 9/11, UConn considered emergency management an internal affair, concerning internal incidents.
     
The development of its police force in 1971 was a response to UConn’s expanded security needs as the college population grew, involving police investigations into campus incidents and severe weather-related events. And, like campuses across the nation, on September 11, 2001, safety on the UConn campus became immediately focused on expanded emergency preparedness in the larger global picture. UConn’s Department of Public and Environmental Safety evolved to maintain a safe campus environment, as well as to prepare for larger and more devastating emergencies.

How UConn’s Public Safety Division Grew
This premier command public safety post started like most cornerstone organizations in higher education, from small incremental steps beginning when Connecticut State College officially became the University of Connecticut in 1939.
     
UConn relied on a small security department, based in an on-campus physical plant building, to meet the day-to-day needs of University security.
     
The University also had its own fire department on campus in 1939, equipped with a Model T fire truck – a department vital for a large school in a rural area. The University population dwarfs the local population and the nearest large city is Hartford, about 30 miles away.  In having its own professional fire department UConn was, and remains, uncommon among most colleges or universities in America.
     
The fire department has grown over the years into a fully-certified unit, with a paid, highly-skilled fire and emergency rescue staff, trained in emergency medical services, hazardous material emergency response, and fire education. Fire department equipment now includes two hazardous material response trucks, two basic life support ambulances, a fully self-supporting decontamination trailer, and a 100-foot ladder truck that has the capacity to reach the roof of the highest building on the Storrs campus.
     
In 1971 the University’s police department was chartered by Connecticut statute and moved to larger quarters in its own building at the top of a hill overlooking the bucolic campus and town, continuing its history of protection and service to the UConn community. The fire department remained in the physical plant building.
     
UConn’s early history is very important for small colleges to note, as a large percentage of small colleges in the United States today still rely primarily on either local police and fire departments for their campus security and safety services or they may rely on internal security services that might or might not be subcontracted by security companies. UConn’s passage through this critical security growth process is a chart for smaller colleges on their way to becoming more emergency ready.
     
UConn has many resources at hand to meet the challenge of impending emergencies, but even colleges with a much smaller budget need to take into account all the variables that a large university must consider in making their campus safe. The history leading up to UConn’s present-day Division of Public and Environmental Safety, headed by Associate Vice President and Chief of Police Robert S. Hudd and second-in-command Major Ronald Blicher, the director of Police Services, reflects the journey that public or private institutions of all sizes take as they plan for comprehensive emergency preparedness.
       
Growing public safety duties and responsibilities at UConn were met by the growing police and fire department, and, in the mid-1980s, planning and funding began for a new ultramodern public safety complex and emergency preparedness command center that would provide comprehensive services for the expanding campus. The building, which houses both the fire and the police segments of the Division of Public Safety for UConn, opened in 1992, and is command central for the Division of Public and Environmental Safety.
     
This comprehensive division consists of the Police Department, Fire Department, Environmental Health and Safety Department, Locksmith Department, and the Office of the Fire Marshal and Building Inspector.
     
One of the services that met the challenges of expanded needs on campus is the Husky Watch safe escort service, provided by work-study students under the supervision of the Police Department that last year logged 16,000 escort calls.
     
The Public Safety complex maintains 24/7 availability each day of the year with its 81-member force. This public safety institution within an institution offers such a broad service to UConn that even state and local police might consider this department as an operational model of which to aspire.
     
In early 2000 the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA), the association that accredits excellence in national and international police forces, recognized UConn’s police department with accreditation. Law enforcement agencies must be in compliance with over 400 state-of-the-art standards to attain accreditation by the Commission, and only 17 police agencies in Connecticut and only 42 college or university law enforcement agencies in the United States have been accredited. It should be noted that the process of accreditation is voluntary, and encompasses all police facilities throughout the United States, with campus police being only a small portion of CALEA. The process of accreditation helped to streamline UConn’s Emergency Command Center’s internal operation policies. Currently the UConn Police Department is going through the accreditation process administered by the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administration (IACLEA).

Crisis and Emergency
In 1985 UConn had a preview of future emergency preparedness with Hurricane Gloria, which caused extensive property damage and killed 8 people along the east coast of the United States. At the time of landfall on Long Island, Gloria had sustained winds of 85 mph while rapidly moving forward at 35 mph. This combination of sustained winds and rapid forward motion produced major hurricane conditions (gusts to 115 mph) across a narrow area of eastern Long Island and New York. Although Gloria was not a major hurricane when it struck Connecticut, it was still the most damaging hurricane since Hurricane Carol in 1954.
     
During the hurricane UConn students, faculty, and staff were directed and assisted by the University police department. Rainfall, property damage and local power outages kept regional businesses closed for days, although the University itself was restored quickly and maintained on a generator power system.
     
Fortunately, at that time, UConn students were primarily Connecticut residents and most of them had homes nearby to wait out the storm and the following days of power outage in the state. This storm, as well as the Blizzard of 1978, was a local weather emergency that the public safety department at UConn effectively managed for the University community.
     
On September 11, 2001, however, emergency outlook took on international proportions.
As the events unfolded in New York City and Washington, D.C. on the morning of September 11, UConn, like most colleges and universities throughout the United States, convened a special meeting of their senior administrators at its emergency operations center in the public safety complex, and conducted a briefing of what they already knew. Their primary concern was to establish how vulnerable UConn was, and how this tragic and shocking event would affect operational status at the University.
     
The world of higher education had suddenly changed and administrators worked together to meet the challenges ahead. This first response after 9/11 set the University on the path to reevaluating its emergency preparedness in the face of the global threat, and to develop a critical response to meet the new challenges of emergency preparedness. Campus security prior to September 11 was primarily the function of campus police and fire departments, but has since expanded to encompass the input and involvement of students, faculty, and staff. Threats to colleges and universities now include not just natural disasters but chemical and terrorism threats, and pandemic diseases.
     
This expansion of threats has brought federal, state, and local agencies together to formulate comprehensive plans, with agency coordination for the University managed by UConn’s on-campus command central Division of Public and Environmental Safety. By 2007 UConn’s Emergency Response Management Plan developed to meet the ongoing needs of safety as well as emergency management at the University.        
     
In April 2007 another tragic crisis changed the scope of campus emergency management and response across America. The deadliest school-shooting rampage in United States history occurred, on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, one of the Virginia’s largest and most prestigious universities. A student gunman, in a shooting spree in a dorm and a classroom, killed 32 people and wounded 17 others before killing himself.
     
The Virginia Tech shootings galvanized the nation’s campuses, revealing the grim potential for a crisis to take place on college campuses and the need to re-examine emergency management response and, in particular, emergency communication within the campus community.

UConn’s Emergency Response Management Plan
UConn had already begun to review and reevaluate its Emergency Response Management Plan prior to the shootings at Virginia Tech. A review in early 2006 of its then-current plan showed that it did not meet the threat of domestic terrorism and revealed the need for enhanced emergency communications. The development of a new Emergency Response Management Plan began, in compliance with the National Incident Management System (NIMS), and review was completed by summer 2006.
     
Under the leadership of UConn’s vice president and chief operating officer, Barry Feldman, the new Emergency Response Management Plan redefined and directed the expansion of the chain of command before, during, and after an emergency on campus, a chain of command that starts with the Executive Emergency Policy Council.
     
It is important for small colleges to note that UConn’s management chain of command policy is reflective of how management needs to be addressed on campuses of all sizes. UConn may have the resources that smaller schools don’t have to maintain an expansive senior management, but each job that a senior and subordinate manager executes still needs to be taken into consideration at even the smallest college.
     
The UConn emergency management structure is consistent with the Incident Command Structure (ICS) of the National Incident Management System’s standard, which is a basis for organizing emergency planning and response, providing concise management information. This structure should be in every school’s emergency management plans.
     
The structure consists of top management, in UConn’s case the Executive Emergency Policy Council, overseeing an Emergency Management Team, which is responsible for media communications, emergency support functions, and operations, planning, logistics and administration/finance.
     
UConn’s president, Michael J. Hogan, or his designee, serves as the head of the Executive Emergency Policy Council, which delegates authority to the Emergency Management Team to activate the University’s Emergency Response Management Plan and the Emergency Operation Center, located in the Public Safety complex.
     
The Emergency Management Team serves as the president’s liaison within the Emergency Operations Center and is responsible for the overall coordination of the emergency. The Emergency Management Team comprises the emergency management director, the associate vice president of public and environmental safety, the associate vice president for human resources, the associate vice president of operations and administration, and the dean of students. In the event that these representatives are unavailable, the UConn Department of Public Safety Command representative will assume authority for the activation of this plan and the Emergency Operation Center, and will provide overall coordination until one of the above designees is available.
     
Each office of the University adds an important element and imparts vital information to the Emergency Response Management Plan. Human Resources is responsible for managing 5,000 faculty and staff and communicating to them their responsibilities. The facilities department needs to address any structural compromise of any facility during an emergency, and also is responsible for identifying buildings on campus that are vulnerable targets for domestic terrorism. Health Services needs to be ready with equipment and staff to meet the needs of a possible medical crisis. The responsibility of Student Affairs extends beyond students; in a crisis they would provide support services like food, housing, and emergency medical coordination. Even the athletic department is critical to an effective Emergency Response Management Plan for two basic reasons: first, its facilities are highly vulnerable prospects for domestic terrorism; second, those same large facilities have the capacity to house many people during an emergency.
     
Emergency Response Management Plan Levels
An effective emergency response management plan requires a commonly accepted set of assumed operational conditions, called planning assumptions, that provide a foundation for establishing protocols and procedures. The standard practice is to base planning on worst-case conditions.
     
UConn’s Emergency Response Management Plan identifies four levels of incidents, from minor to disaster, and has set guidelines for anticipated response actions and notification procedures for each incident level.
     
The first two incident levels establish the responsibility of coordination and notification of incidents to the department with primary responsibility for the incident. Levels three and four identify emergency/incident levels that require activation of UConn’s Emergency Response Management Plan and the Emergency Operation Center. The specified levels are:

UConn’s Emergency Communications System
The critical addition to the Emergency Response Management Plan is the Emergency Communications System, developed by the Emergency Communications Committee chaired by UConn’s Chief Information Officer, Michael Kerntke.
     
Within weeks of the Virginia tragedy, a very broad group of people from throughout the University and its regional branches came together to work specifically on the alert notification system at UConn. The Emergency Communications Committee was established by UConn’s vice president and chief operating officer Barry Feldman in response to the perceived need that a more comprehensive process of notification needed to be established.
     
The committee meets weekly to work on recommendations for enhanced communication systems and consists of staff, faculty and personnel from the departments of information technology, public safety, communications, student affairs, human resources, facilities operations, purchasing, health services, the provost offices, athletics, and the UConn Law School and regional campus representatives. Sub-committees were also formed to focus on specific technologies.
     
The inclusion of managers, faculty, and student leaders on recommendation committees is invaluable in pointing out crucial vulnerable scenarios, facilities, or areas of a campus for the important risk assessment part of an emergency response management plan. Under the Committee’s direction, UConn took on the responsibility to create aggressive communication procedures that execute communications at many levels and with redundancies in mind.
     
A significant consideration for the Emergency Communications Committee is what communication needs to be at hand in case of a crisis, and how it is communicated to the general public. For communication to be effective, it must reach students, faculty, staff, visitors, and surrounding areas in a timely manner. During a crisis effective communication with relevant and correct information needs to be streamed to the local, regional, and national media so that the public has up-to-date and accurate information at its disposal.
     
Highly trained officers working at the Emergency Operations Center located in the Public Safety complex handle the operation of communications equipment, and release authorized communication directives, getting that information out in the quickest manner possible. UConn’s impressive state-of-the-art Dispatch Center has four highly organized command bays fully equipped to handle any event.
     
The Emergency Communications Committee has made many recommendations for enhanced communication on the University campus. Variables in communication to the campus community, such as emergencies in the summer term or in middle of the night during a winter session, have been addressed.
     
Communication issues, such as how the Emergency Management Team could contact the University community both on and off campus during a crisis, have resulted in several new systems on the University campuses. UConn has taken a proactive approach to investing in variety of communications systems, supplied by different companies to effectively cover communications during crisis.
     
The Emergency Communications Plan is devised to use a variety of communication methods to let people know of the event and what to do. Again, it is important to note that UConn considers redundancies in its emergency systems very important when constructing its emergency response management plan. In the most extreme situations, UConn might activate everything, but some situations might require use of only some of its communications options.
     
UConn utilizes an emergency web portal, public address systems and sirens, code blue phones, web banner activation, text messaging, e-mail alerts, and voice mail alerts to communicate with its community, with these methods:

UConn, like many colleges and universities throughout the United States, initially had a slow response from students, faculty, and staff opting into UConn’s emergency text messaging service when it was first offered after the Virginia Tech shooting. UConn took into consideration that like any change, emergency preparedness takes time for the community to become aware of and engage in the process. Subscribers to the system were asked to visit a web site set up for the service, and use their UConn ID and passwords to confidentially enter their cell phone number which would be used for emergency messaging.
     
In August 2007, just before the fall semester commenced, John Saddlemire, the Vice President for Student Affairs, and Robert Hudd, Director of Public Safety, sent a letter to the parents and guardians of UConn students that outlined the emergency text message service, asking for their help in promoting the use of the system by their children. With parents’ influence and endorsement, enrollment in the system rapidly went up from about 4000 in August to over 15,000 by the end of September.  Additionally, while the letter indicated it would contact enrollees in case of life or death events, participants responded that they would also want to be contacted for anything that would affect them at campus, from weather on up.
     
To aid in the effectiveness of communication with employees and students off campus, the University communications plan also incorporates local radio and TV. And, of course, word of mouth would play a big role. This underlines the importance the University puts in getting out effective communication with relevant and correct information to the public in a timely manner.
     
An important part of the ongoing communications committee’s role is to conduct tests of different communications systems, like the text messaging system, blue phones, and sirens, in order to determine how well they perform. Students, faculty, and staff all participate in the continuing tests and offer feedback that is very important to the effectiveness of the communications equipment. UConn expects that when a system is tested for the first time, it may not operate at optimum effectiveness. The key is to identify the challenges and work to fix them quickly.

UConn’s Emergency Response Management Areas
UConn’s responsibilities and involvement in emergency preparedness goes beyond its main campus in Storrs, and even its law school campus and five regional campuses. The Emergency Response Management Plan also includes the local areas adjacent to the University campuses.  In a major crisis UConn might receive directives from the State of Connecticut Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
     
Major Blicher considers emergency management at UConn to be divided into three areas: the Emergency Response Management Plan, the Pandemic Continuity of Operations Plan, and Host Community Responsibility.

Pandemic Continuity of Operations
The Pandemic Business Continuity Plan was developed upon direction of the Governor of Connecticut, M. Jodi Rell, that each state agency establish a business continuity plan in consideration of the potential for a pandemic. It is a complex analysis of vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and needs that the University might experience during a crisis such as a pandemic flu. This report particularly takes into account the fiscal vulnerabilities of UConn during a long-term crisis, as well as the problems of research, animal care, and property safety, and is, like the Emergency Response Management Plan, NIMS-compliant.

Host Community Responsibility
In the event of a radiological emergency at the Millstone nuclear power station, 30 miles away, UConn would act as a host community for the evacuated residents of Ledyard, a town near the nuclear facility. UConn is a host community in the Connecticut Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security’s Area Four and, as such, has a frequent dialogue with the State of Connecticut in the development of regional emergency response plans. UConn participates in host community drills on a routine basis with the nuclear plant and local communities so that they will be ready if the need ever arises.
     
Budgeting for a Crisis
There is really no fiscal rule of thumb when it comes to a crisis, but there are some important considerations when establishing fiscal rules for emergency products and/or services.
     
Like most colleges and universities, UConn would have to readjust the budget in response to emergency needs. As a state school, UConn follows state procurement regulations even in a crisis. For emergency spending, the school would have to figure out where, out of another part of the school’s budget, to take the money.
     
When UConn contracts with a company for emergency products and/or services, they consider the initial purchase to be just the beginning. Depending on the emergency products and/or services, UConn also adds to the contract installation, maintenance, repair, and, more importantly, training. Much of the communications and emergency equipment requires ongoing training. UConn requires companies that supply emergency products and/or services to go through the request for proposal process.
     
UConn’s budget for emergency products and services recognizes that they are a large university with almost 29,000 students, and over 5,000 faculty and staff on its five campuses. A small college might not have the budget UConn has to establish an expansive emergency preparedness plan, but a small college can still consider emergency preparedness on a smaller scale. There are many creative ways that both small and large institutions can develop an expansive emergency preparedness plan. One very important way schools can create a safer campus is through cooperation, as highlighted in this issue’s article, Preparing for a Perfect Storm through Cooperation.
     
Perhaps the final thing to consider when preparing for a crisis on campus is that even if an institution is not part of a higher education consortium, cooperation, communication, and community are vital. After detailing all the impressive management structures and emergency preparedness equipment on campus, Major Ronald Blicher, of the UConn Police Department, pointed out that one of the most important components of emergency planning is simply for senior management to actively communicate on a regular basis to allow for ease of communications during a crisis, thereby providing for a more rapid recovery phase in time of crisis.

Lesley A. Dyson is the editor for Higher Education Consortia magazine. She can be reached at (860) 487-9404, or at lesley@collegebenefitspublishing.com.