Emergency Preparedness
Questions to Help You Plan
by Pamela McLaren

Here are some suggestions for campus members related to emergency planning. Some of these come from the CSU video "Academic Aftershocks," several copies of which are available for departments to view.

What you can do:
• Safety Training
• Staying Connected

• Does your department or division have an up-to-date emergency plan? This should be a priority.

• Does your department/division participate in campuswide excercises?

• Are faculty members included in emergency training?

• Are faculty members prepared to help students? (Students will tend to do what they see faculty members doing. If faculty leave a building calmly, so will students.)

• Are faculty, staff and administrators trained to handle injuries and even deaths?

• Are faculty, staff and administrators trained in their emergency roles? Do they know where they're supposed to be and what they're supposed to do?

• Are administrators aware of the decisions they will have to make?

• Are damage assessment contracts in place with experts? (This will be necessary if buildings experience structural damage.)

• Are contracts in place with contractors that may be needed for clean up?

• How will the campus, divisions and departments assess and adapt to continuing problems?

• Is there an adequate system for communications? Do all departments/divisions have telephone trees so they know how to contact one another?

• Are furniture and equipment anchored to the floor? (One of the problems at Cal State Northridge was that file cabinets and bookcases fell in front of doors, blocking access.)

• Have back-ups or duplicates (if possible) been made of important documents or research findings? In the event of a disaster that affects the safety of buildings, campus members may not be able to enter for several weeks ... if not months.

• Why Disaster Planning?
• Questions to Help you Plan
• Are you Prepared?
• The Crisis Happens

• Are important documents located in such a way that if a campus building is not accessible, campus members have other ways of retrieving this information? Key information should be stored off-site.

 

Are you Prepared? »