What to Do When Severe Storms Strike
Advance warning, education, maintenance, personal responsibility and relationships with all stakeholders combine to reduce the impact of bad weather.
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Remind Everyone They Are Responsible for Their Safety
Everyone on campus must also be educated on how they should personally respond to threatening weather both before an alert has been issued, as well as after. No one should get into the habit of waiting for emergency alerts. Instead, they must take immediate action when weather threatens.
Severe weather can easily outpace emergency notification systems. For example, a tornado warning may be issued and expire before an emergency alert can be process and received.
Educating the campus community on recognizing the signs of approaching severe weather and the immediate actions to take is the responsibility of everyone – not just the emergency preparedness office. Faculty and staff must be trained during new employee orientation, and students must be trained during new student orientation and residential life floor meetings.
Campus officials must make their subpopulations aware of relevant weather issues based on the likely threats during a specific time of year. Creative approaches must be always tried; from providing weather radios for departments with specific needs, providing brown bag lunch educational sessions, training and certification programs and information/resource guides.
Building collaborative relationships with faculty, student affairs, human resources, facility operations, grounds, public safety, student government, residence hall association and other departments will provide the means to educate the many groups on campus. Building relationships with campus stakeholders will also provide enormous benefits in the event that severe weather strikes campus, causing damage and other problems. The communications voice for the campus must be involved at every step.
Be Sure Training Addresses a Diverse Audience
Public safety professionals, especially police officers, starting their careers decades ago never dreamed that they would one day need to monitor and act on weather events on campus. Today’s institutions must focus on education and training to meet the diverse population served.
There are many ways to educate and train the ever changing campus community, but it must meet the changing generation’s way of receiving information (for exam
ple, Twitter and Facebook). It must also address the constant need for ongoing training due to the matriculation of the community. Members of the campus community, including professors who teach specialized classes (for example, the earth and atmospheric sciences), can provide valuable training.
It can be difficult to make decisions about how to respond to severe weather, but having a mitigation and education strategy will help. Campus public safety officials must be ready, and to be ready, students, faculty and staff must be prepared as well. Like so many other aspects of campus safety – being prepared for severe weather is the job of everyone.
Read more about emergency preparedness.
Andy Altizer, Teresa Crocker and William Smith all work for the Georgia Institute of Technology. Altizer is the director of emergency preparedness, Crocker is the chief of police and Smith is the emergency preparedness project manager.
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