Is Campus IT Ready for Rita?
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.
But it’s not just Galveston that’s affected by Rita, there are
other Texas towns on the coast – like Corpus Christi, with its Texas
A&M branch campus there, and even Houston institutions, although
they’re inland, are going to feel this one.
However, it’s not likely that a repeat of the slow onset of hugely widespread
flooding will occur in Texas, because the geography d'es not match that in the
New Orleans area. Barring unforeseen circumstances, the Texas institutions will
prepare, evacuate, and then be able to return and be functioning fairly soon.
If any have to close for an entire semester, like all of those in the New Orleans
area have, it will be a real surprise.
At Texas A&M Corpus Christi,
the “Island University,” classes are cancelled after Wednesday,
but with the expectation that they will resume on Monday. All students are to
be off the island by 10 am Thursday. All the Texas institutions seem to have
already made plans for their websites to be mirrored in safer places and have
staff moved into place to maintain their sites in the event of things getting
really bad.
IT-wise, the wonderful Hurricane
Relief Community Exchange that EDUCAUSE created post-Katrina is already
in place for Rita victims, and it offers a lot of thoughtful interactivity and
resources. I hope the administrators at the Texas institutions are aware of
it; likewise the CampusRelief.org
website.
Something else for those affected by Katrina and Rita to bear in mind is the
generous work being done by ACUTA, the Association for Communications Technology
Professionals in Higher Education. In addition to offering yet another clearinghouse
for those wishing to offer or ask for assistance, http://www.acuta.org/?1383#IMPORTANT
ACUTA is forming volunteer teams of communications and networking infrastructure
professionals to go to affected schools and assist with everything
from damage assessment to physical repair.
And, of course, don’t overlook Campus
Technology’s set of useful resources and links.
Between Ivan in Florida last year, Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi, and
now Rita in Texas, you’d think that we’re learning enough lessons
to last a lifetime. One thing’s certain: If, in four years, we haven’t
learned and put a lot more of the lessons into practice, more than we learned
and put into practice after 9/11, it’ll be a disgrace.
