Earth to College Park: We’re not in Kansas
by AnonTerp on Oct.13, 2011, under Leadership
Repeated blasts of the warning horns, police racing about in cars with lights and sirens, and all over the period of about 40 minutes, counting down until a “forecast” tornado was going to hit campus. This tornado warning had to be the real deal, and we all took it seriously as such.
Except Officer Chicken Little seemed to have been in charge tonight. After frantically checking other weather sites, surfing to NOAA and even eyeballing the comparatively clear sky, we concluded nothing was up and went home. The all clear was texted a bit later, without explanation of what it was that campus officials saw that nobody else did.
Leaving aside how hard it is to find ‘urgent messages’ from campus by going to the main campus page (seriously – people on this campus research this stuff, you’d think we could do better), once we got there it wasn’t of much value:
Probably not what you want to see when sirens are wailing and a tornado is bearing down on you in three, count ‘em, three minutes.
The alert system itself, however, works great. It’s too bad fewer people will be inclined to pay attention to it in the future.
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October 13th, 2011 on 9:45 pm
I love it. In the middle of this Chinese fire drill, the first things panicked students see on the basic UMD site is that ten million has been donated for a facility that probably won’t even be built.
October 16th, 2011 on 10:44 am
I’ve heard a couple generic comments about “better safe than sorry” and that was the essence of the campus comments in a WTOP report on this. (It smacked of some campus PR type trying to take the edge off a screw up.)
There were consequences though. As an example, by DOTS policy, bus service halts immediately upon such an alarm going out. This is probably the right thing in case of a real emergency, but the consequence of doing this needlessly was (we now know) stranding students in some pretty unpleasant areas for the evening, with neither transport nor word about what was going on. We see crime reports all the time from the same Public Safety office that just ensured a number of our students were placed even more a risk of those crimes by having to take unplanned hikes out of those neighborhoods.