How Ready Is Ready?

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How Ready Is Ready?

9/26/2006

By Mikael Blaisdell

Of course, in the event of an emergency, the entire campus community—and anyone nationwide or worldwide who is interested in the fate of your institution and any of its community members—will be looking to your website for guidance. Let’s take a look at the websites of the three disaster-concerned institutions we cover here—Xavier, USC, and UC-Berkeley—and see how they fare. What we find just may be instructive for campus administrators everywhere.

Start with the Website

When Katrina took out Xavier’s website, it took with it one of the best means of disseminating vital information to the entire campus community. Clearly, having a remote location to automatically take over the website (if at any time the main site g'es down) is a substantial asset in the event of a major emergency. All three schools—Xavier, USC, and UC-Berkeley—currently have just such a resource.

Testing can serve more than one important function, for the willingness of the senior administration team to go along with it (especially if there are substantial costs involved) will tell you what importance the institution assigns to the initiative.

A visit to the main page of USC’s website reveals an Emergency Info tab at the top right of the screen. That link takes site visitors to a separate site, which informs visitors that it automatically comes up as the substitute main page for www.usc.edu if for any reason the primary site becomes unavailable. The emergency site provides contact phone numbers for parents trying to reach students, and in a real emergency, could be used for general announcements and updates.

Xavier’s emergency site, established in June of 2005, is hosted by a California-based commercial service with four separate data centers. A link to the emergency site, Emergency Preparedness, is prominently displayed on the bottom of Xavier’s main page, although the location on the page means that some site visitors may have to scroll down to see it. The university’s emergency website can also be located via a Google search.

UC-Berkeley’s primary site d'es not have a main page link to its Office of Emergency Preparedness, but the page can be found by doing a web search, leading you to 'ep.berkeley.edu. The school also has an off-site resource, emergency.berkeley.edu (through EarthLink), and is in the process of completing a reciprocal arrangement with the University of California-Los Angeles for mirroring some critical functions at UCLA’s Southern California IT center.

According to Tom Klatt, manager of UC-Berkeley’s Office of Emergency Preparedness, “The equipment is in the racks; we’re just working out the firewall and certificate issues before going live.”

Publishing Plans Online

All three emergency preparedness sites provide downloadable materials for students, faculty, and parents to use in making their individual contingency plans. Since Katrina, Xavier requires its students to make and file such plans within three weeks of arriving on campus. (During post-Katrina evaluations, it was realized that in order to properly plan for evacuation of those students who did not have their own transportation, the university would have to know in advance which, and how many, students would be affected.)