The University of Mississippi’s Crisis Action Team (CAT) continues to increase emergency preparedness and use social media to make Ole Miss a safe campus.
CAT is composed of five people on campus: Emergency Management Coordinator Jim Windham, Dean of Students Sparky Reardon, Chief of Police Calvin Sellers, Chief Communications Officer Tom Eppes and Associate Provost Noel Wilkin.
This past winter intersession, the Oxford campus was faced with the “threat of ice and predicted hazardous road conditions,” and on Jan. 15, CAT made the decision to close campus.
The university responded by sending texts, emails and a tweets to inform students, faculty and staff. Classes scheduled at or after noon on that day were made up later on predetermined make-up days. According to Wilkin, these make-up days were built into the schedule in case class was canceled.
“We follow the same procedures each time for winter weather, and we follow a checklist that has been developed and refined over several years,” Wilkin said.
That checklist now includes Twitter alerts. The UM Emergency Twitter account sent its first tweet on Oct. 16, 2012, in response to the boil water advisory.
Like January, October kept CAT busy managing campus safety. The boil water advisory went into effect after a water line broke on campus near a construction site. The next day a tornado watch was in effect in Lafayette County. In each case, the alerts were emailed, texted and tweeted by Ole Miss.
CAT is continually working to improve its preparedness for domestic and natural emergencies. An Incident Response Team (IRT) was created to handle the task of planning for emergency scenarios while developing appropriate responses. According to Wilkin, the IRT meets monthly to debrief and discuss.
“We are always looking for ways to improve our preparedness and our response to campus emergencies,” he said. “We have learned from other institutions, the local emergency management administrators and from the National Weather Service.
“For example, our real-time, time-stamped emergency website was developed by our IT department after watching how other institutions responded to tornadoes,” he said. “We learned the value of being able to communicate quickly and tell people the status of our campus.”
According to Wilkin, the Institutions of Higher Learning for Mississippi has noted the university’s efforts in preparedness and leadership in emergency planning.
Follow @RebAlerts to get the UM Emergency Twitter alerts.
