Georgia State University is a major research university located in downtown Atlanta, the Southeast’s government, financial, retail, health and legal center. The university’s more than 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students are spread out among six colleges, surrounded by high-rise buildings, a rapid transit system, and two hospitals, one of which is a Level 1 trauma center.
If a major emergency or disaster takes place, the Office of Emergency Management at Georgia State is responsible for “all-hazards/threats” emergency response and disaster management. Like other universities, Georgia State’s emergency and disaster management plan is based upon alerting its large population, with its urban environment which has significant ambient noise on a 24/7 basis, depends upon redundant mass notification systems with diverse functionality, including the capability to communicate using live voice.
Challenges – Emergency mass notification via text, e-mail and phone messages vulnerable to bandwidth-limitations and lack of flexibility.
Like many campuses, text messages, e-mails and phone messages are part of Georgia State’s emergency mass notification protocol. However, Mike Raderstorf, director of the Office of Emergency Management at Georgia State, believes these methods are limited in scope and effectiveness and are not ideal for maintaining situational awareness during an actual ongoing emergency event.
Time delays: “If we send out a text message, an e-mail message and a phone call letting everyone know that we’re dealing with an emergency, it’s going to take anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to get that message out to over 28,000 students, faculty and staff, depending upon how much bandwidth is available at that time,” says Raderstorf.
Situations change quickly, call for quick response. “Once you send out one message, it’s very difficult to send out follow-up messages quickly enough to maintain situational awareness across a large population,” says Raderstorf. “Let’s say that the situation is cleared, or five minutes later, you find out it’s a false alarm. You can’t recall that message and say ‘all clear.’ You have to stop the message, but some people have already received the message and other people never received it. Then, you must give an all-clear message.”
High Ambient Noise Makes Notifications Difficult to Hear
The Georgia State campus is located in an area with significant ambient noise on a 24/7 basis. Not only are there many high rise buildings, but the campus is located next to Grady Memorial Hospital, a Level 1 trauma center, and MARTA (Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority), Atlanta’s public transportation system of subways and buses. According to Raderstorf, “We compete with a lot of noise. When you start to crank up the amps as loud as you can with a normal 360 degree speaker array, the first thing that you’re going to notice is that you’re going to have substantial echoes, which basically mitigates your sound systems.”
Solution – IML SoundCommander SC-360 and AlertCommander for redundant and simultaneous emergency notification.
If there is a major emergency at Georgia State University, the fastest method for the Emergency Management department to get out an emergency alert is with the IML SoundCommander SC- 360 mass notification system, Raderstorf believes.
“I could literally drop the phone and broadcast a message on our campus in about five seconds,” says Raderstorf. “With any other system that I have, I have to go into the computer or type in some type of PIN access code, go through a couple of different screens and then, generally even with my best practices, it would take me a couple of minutes to actually get that message out.
With the SoundCommander SC-360, notification is practically instantaneous.”