And is that just one business continuity plan with multiple components?

LUCUS: Yes. It will be one plan for the campus, but each department will have its own piece of it, and then that will all get consolidated up into a campus plan.

It’ll be all hazard. It will include things like delegation of authority, such as who’s in charge if the boss isn’t there. That’s important because a lot of organizations don’t consider that.

Does your campus currently have a business continuity plan?

LUCUS: No. The only one that we’ve really had is the one we did with the pandemic planning two years ago. Business continuity is one of those things that is really popular out in the private sector — in those companies that are going to lose a lot of money if their servers go down. But it’s a fairly new concept to colleges and universities.

Katrina, I think, pushed that along in a big way because of all the colleges and universities down there that couldn’t function. They couldn’t hold classes; they couldn’t do anything.

Have there been any initiatives that haven’t worked out the way you planned? Can you give the reasons why?

LUCUS: The initiatives that may not have worked out yet might still work out. There is a time for everything, and there are a lot of times when you propose something and it isn’t ready to happen.

A lot of it is time and money. There is a proposal out there that I’m working on to address the buildings. A lot of older campuses like this one don’t have numbers on the buildings or names on the roads. It would take a lot of money to go back and redo all of that. It’s one of those initiatives that’s on the back burner because of the budget.

So how do you create a culture of safety and security?

LUCUS: You create a culture where people know what that siren means when they hear it. People know what they’re supposed to do if there is an earthquake; people pay attention to what’s going on around them, and they take responsibility for themselves. They don’t expect some unnamed source or somebody else to take responsibility for them.

I believe in being very collaborative with everybody, so we have a very collaborative relationship with the rest of the campus. One of the
things that a good emergency manager does more than anything else is be a facilitator. You’ve got to be able to go out and see what groups are working on and see if it relates to what other groups are working on. Then, you need to get them together so that they can see what’s happening.

The same thing goes with the community. Whatever happens to us is going to happen in our community too. There are a lot of things we can do to help each other. Because of this, one of the first things I did when I got here was go out and meet all of the counterparts in emergency management and emergency response in the city and the county. They depend on us for a lot; we depend on them for a lot.

I think that in the last two years, this campus has come a long way. We have the support of all levels of the organization from the chancellor down. The chancellor is the chair of the EOC executive policy team. That team makes the policy decisions if anything happens. Everybody is into this; everybody supports this.

 

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The Lucus File

Name: Valerie Lucus

Title: Emergency Manager

Campus: The University of California Davis (UC Davis) has around 700 structures, more than 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and 20,000 faculty and staff. The main campus has 5,300 acres, making it the largest campus in the whole University of California school system. The university also has facilities in neighboring areas and a medical center in Sacramento, Calif.

Department: The emergency management team consists of two individuals. However, The UC Davis Police Department employs 50 sworn officers and 20 civilians.

Experience: Ten years in emergency management in Marin County, Calif.; five years in emergency management at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. Lucus is also one of the few credentialed as a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM) and a Certified Business Continuity Planner (CBCP).

 

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Ashley Willis is associate editor of Campus Safety. She can be reached at (310) 533-2419 or ashley.willis@bobit.com.

To subscribe to the unabridged print version of Campus Safety magazine, click here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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