After the Virginia Tech shootings last year, ASU instituted a cell-phone warning policy, in which students could sign up to receive alerts about dangerous happenings on campus. Sounds like a pretty good idea. Whenever a fire, shooting, terrorist gas attack, nuclear reactor explosion or any other manner of potentially deadly event happens, students will immediately receive a message telling them what's going on and what to do.
"Brilliant," we thought. "Information will be quickly and easily disseminated across campus, lives will be saved and chaos will be averted."
Unfortunately, as is so often the case, reality did not mimic the smoothly operating procedure we envisioned.
Last Thursday's fire in the Memorial Union was the first chance to test out the new system. Instead of sending out messages alerting students of a fire and asking them to evacuate the MU, campus officials waited more than an hour to send the messages. In some cases, students did not receive messages until more than two hours after the fire was put out. If the fire had been worse, they could have received those messages about one hour after their charred bodies stopped smoking. Very helpful.
To make matters more difficult, students have to sign up for the emergency alerts online. Currently only 3,600 have done so. The Web site to sign up is: https://www.asu.edu/go/alert_text/.
ASU also sent out emails alerting students of the fire. However, they sent them to students' exchange accounts, which we're betting about one out of every 10 of you even knows how to access, much less checks on a daily basis. Why not send emails to students' @asu.edu accounts?
The final problem with the system is that it only has the ability to send out 15 text messages per second. That may seem quite fast, but then we are the largest school in the country. If all 63,000 of us were to sign up for the service, it would take the current system 70 minutes at 15 text messages each second to send a message to all of us.
The shootings at Columbine lasted 23 minutes.
Cho's rampage at Virginia Tech lasted nine minutes.
Seventy minutes is just not acceptable if ASU's text-message alert system is to be anything other than a public relations scheme to make it seem that ASU is doing something to protect its students. Unless the information in the emergency text messages can be dispersed school-wide in minutes, the system is useless. ASU must invest more money in the system and upgrade it in at least two ways. First, it must advertise better so more students sign up. Second, it must drastically increase the texts-per-second.
If ASU officials don't want to do this, they might as well scrap the system and hire a town crier with a really big bullhorn.
