Is Campus IT Ready for Rita?

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Is Campus IT Ready for Rita?

9/21/2005

By Terry Calhoun

For some reason I cannot get the Beatles song, Lovely Rita Meter Maid, out of my head this week: “Lovely Rita meter maid. Nothing can come between . . .” - between Rita and Galveston, is what it’s looking like. (Now you can blame me for getting into your head, while you ponder the possibility that Rita and her ilk have come to collect the payment due for the sloppy way that humans have been parking on mother Earth.)

Even as everyone engaged by Katrina is still, slowly, realizing the dramatic complexity of the circumstances from that storm, yet another handful of higher education institutions are preparing for a major hit. And the folks in the Galveston area are taking this seriously. After all, the hurricane there in 1900 is still considered the largest hurricane disaster in United States history, with 8,000 dead. Will some of the lessons recently learned be put into play? Can some of the aid mechanisms already in place be shifted to assist Texas schools?

Before I go off into Rita stuff, you might want to check out this nifty map at The Chronicle of Higher Education. When you roll over a ‘dot’ that represents a campus, a nice compilation of damages appears.

One thing’s for sure, there has been little advance planning help from FEMA. As recently as the summer of 2002, FEMA was doing some pretty exciting preliminary stuff with its Disaster Resistant Universities program: find a full report on that here, a report which was rolled out to the public at SCUP’s annual conference in San Diego in 2002. But 2003 was the last year FEMA had any financial support specifically for higher education institutions.

And, frankly, the Congress has also been pretty stingy even in the past few weeks with Katrina funds for higher education institutions, although it’s paying pretty careful attention to the financial needs of displaced students.

The University of Texas Medical Branch received $97,500 from FEMA in 2003 for disaster planning. I don’t know if that was directly responsible, but if you look at UTMB’s “Alert” page, there’s clearly been some planning done there. Many do not know it, but the Gulf Coast of Texas is a long series of barrier islands with too many people on them. Here’s how UTMB explains that on its “Preparing for Hurricanes” page: “UTMB is not a shelter, and there are no shelters on Galveston Island. When a call comes to evacuate, the university will not be able to shelter anyone, and staff other than E1 personnel are encouraged to make their own plans for evacuation well in advance.” (E1 personnel are designated staff needed to take primary roles in a hurricane disaster.)

The Institutional Emergency Operations Plan at UTMB is quite comprehensive and was last updated in June of this year. I suspect they’ll come out of this fine, despite the added complications of being a major health and science center, with the presence of patients, chemicals, and diseases to be worried about.