UH Officials, Students May Not Be on Same Page about Campus’s Emergency Readiness; KTUH Not Yet Mentioned as Part of Communications Plan

University of Hawaii officials say they’re confident they can quickly alert the student body during an on-campus emergency, according to a Honolulu Advertiser story today.

CHORE hopes they’re right, but as we cautioned yesterday, over-confidence can be a dangerous thing. The Advertiser asked some UH students what they think about their campus’s readiness. Here are two responses:

"I don't know that we would be able to get the word out," said fine arts senior Amy Craig, a resident adviser at an on-campus dorm. "I'm concerned about the lack of access to students after an emergency. There is no comprehensive plan in place."

"The school is definitely not prepared," said Michele Messina, a junior in psychology and dorm resident. "There's no procedure. We can't lock down."

Two students don’t represent an entire student body, but if any students feel this way, UH officials have reason to wonder about the gap between their own confident attitude and what these – and maybe many other – students believe.

Dialing for Students

The story ticks off some of the ways officials say they would communicate with students – email, a public announcement system in Campus Center and a telephone tree “which starts at top officials and drops down to professors or staff members, who are supposed to notify students.”

The reporter didn’t fully describe the process, but if this “tree” means senior officials will call professors and staff who then will notify students, you have to wonder how quickly an emergency message will reach students – and what the message will sound like when it finally gets there.

Did you play the Telephone Game as a kid? Did the message at the end of the circle ever resemble the message at the start? Surely there’s more to the system than what traditionally passes for a “telephone tree” – a small number of people calling other people who call others until it spreads down the branches in Christmas tree-like fashion.

The first obvious objection is the time involved to move the message down a tree, but there are many more whenever you put people in the middle of a communications chain. Here’s a principle UH officials might well consider: The fewer the components in a communications chain, the faster a message will travel with fewer changes.

What About KTUH?

We’ve had two days of reporting by Honolulu’s two dailies on the university’s emergency alert procedures, but so far, we’ve seen no mention of how officials would use KTUH, the on-campus radio station.

Is that just an oversight, or have officials not even written KTUH into their emergency communications plan? They talk about email and telephone trees and public address systems but presumably have told reporters nothing about how they’d use the ultimate PA system right there on campus – a radio station!

As CHORE noted yesterday, multiple channels are necessary to communicate with a community of people scattered throughout a campus doing different things at any given time. Wiring all major buildings for public address announcements makes sense; emailing makes sense; mass telephone calling makes sense; a wailing siren makes sense; roving security officers make sense, and so does using the broadcast media – both on campus and off. Radio's message stream can be nearly continuous.

H is for Help

CHORE was started as a way to offer helpful comment and stimulate discussion on emergency communications within our community. That’s what we and others are doing when we write our blogs and comment on what others have written.

We're offering help when we encourage officials to abandon any thought of being confident they have everything handled. Based on what UH officials are telling reporters about Manoa's communications plans, it doesn’t look that way to some of us.