Congratulations on surviving the great umbrella scare of 2012.
While it may have been a false alarm, I’m pleasantly surprised with the way the Institute responded. And while some of the jokes that have spread across campus are admittedly quite amusing — seeing President Destler use the word “samurai” in official RIT correspondence remains a personal highlight for me — I’m less than thrilled with how some of my fellow students have reacted.
In the lockdown’s aftermath, I heard a small, but nonetheless surprising number of students complaining about RIT Alert, the Institute’s Emergency Mass Notification system. Yes, the alerts woke you up. At 8 a.m. Here’s my advice: Stop complaining, deal with it and move on.
In my eyes, the Institute’s handling of last week’s incident was certainly an improvement over my previous experience with the RIT Alert system. During a similar occurrence on March 17, 2010, I remember being profoundly confused when I received an all-clear message before the alert itself. Instead of being barricaded up in my dorm room during the incident, I had been down in the tunnels doing laundry. By comparison, while I got several repeat messages this time, that’s perfectly fine by me.
Alert systems are supposed to be big, loud and annoying. That’s how they work, and RIT’s did just that. Any attempt to make the system convenient would have essentially declawed it, stripping it bare of its primary operative. In the case that something had gone wrong, I doubt anyone would have considered the school’s response last week an overreaction.
Take the Virginia Tech massacre, for example. Even after a double-murder early Monday, April 17, 2007, the school failed to notify students, faculty and staff until after a second round of shootings had began. The massacre wound up being one of the deadliest in U.S. history, with 32 victims.
Multiple court cases have been based around Virginia Tech’s lack of action. Last week, only two days before the incident at RIT, the college was once again held responsible in the deaths of two more victims. These families argued that, had there been a proper warning, their daughters would have never gone to the Blacksburg, Va. campus that day. A jury ruled in their favor, and they were awarded $4 million each.
In this case, RIT reacted admirably. A Regional Transportation System (RTS) bus driver, sensing a potential threat, made the reasonable decision to report it. In a post-9/11, post-Columbine world, we have to take precautions. As long as it doesn’t become a regular occurrence or descend into profiling and finger-pointing, the occasional false alarm is an inconvenience I’m willing to bear.
So indeed, I don’t feel any sympathy for your disrupted sleep. If anything, the only person I feel sorry for is our unfortunate, raingear-equipped suspect. If you’re reading, I’ve got a message for you: Keep your chin up, and don’t let anyone get to you.
That isn’t to say I’m gushing with praise for RIT Alert, either. I understand the system isn’t perfect — I would never try suggesting otherwise. While relatively minimal, misinformation did spread online. Some slept through the message; others ignored it.
I’d urge the administration not to take this valuable information in stride. In fact, this should renew your vigor to improve the system. Yes, it works, but it’s not functioning at 100 percent. Through a rather odd situation, you’ve been handed the data from a full-capacity test run. All the system’s strengths and flaws are right in your lap. Use them to your advantage.
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Fri, Mar 23 2012 @ 12:00 pm |
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I completely agree with the writer's last paragraph. Running full-scale exercises at a university is not practical, but those types of exercises are the only way to put pressure on a system to see what happens, evaluate and improve the response. |
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Lynn Daley |
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