OUR VIEWS Consensus Opinion

The Institute confirmed this week that the emergency notice distributed to members of the Tech community last Thursday afternoon was a result of the actions of an individual who had the capability to activate the alert systems but not the authority to do so. Unfortunately, this is just one of the several implementation failures exposed by the system's inadvertent trial run, and administrators must take steps to address the issues identified as a result of the mishap.

The system has yet to undergo a formal test, and Thursday's incident did reveal a number of good things along with the bad. The system actually worked, alerting the vast majority of those who signed up within minutes of the alarm being triggered. Also, most students paid attention to the notifications, rather than ignoring them like they might a fire alarm. Furthermore, the incident increased awareness of the system's existence, and an additional six percent of the student body signed up to be notified in case of emergency as a result.

The flaws, however, far outnumbered the positives. The fact that the message went out in the first place reveals a major issue. Only five people are authorized to set off the notification system, and anyone who is not among this group should not be able to trigger alerts. The incident also revealed a significant and disturbing lack of education about how students and faculty should respond in an emergency. The reactions Thursday afternoon can at best be called haphazard; some professors immediately cancelled class and told students to leave, others contacted administrators and yet others simply ignored the alerts.

Worst of all, the emergency notification failed to provide sufficient instructions for how to best deal with the emergency. The instruction to evacuate campus immediately and watch local media is unrealistic-truly evacuating a campus of Tech's size would be a monumental undertaking. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a scenario that would require a full campus exodus. The notification should give specific instructions instead, such as which parts of campus to avoid.

Due to this mishap, the Institute now faces the challenge of rebuilding confidence in the system. When it was first rolled out, we noted that just one false alarm would undermine its objectives. We are sad our prediction turned out to be prophetic.

To ensure the failures are not repeated, administrators must now educate the entire campus on proper procedures for dealing with emergency alerts. The Institute could also do a better job of communicating updates to a situation on the fly by, for instance, setting up a dedicated website where students can view the latest updates on an in-progress emergency.