Online messages sent within 2 minutes; TV crawler out in 7
As students were safe and asleep in their beds or half-awake and dragging themselves to early morning classes, the Carolina Alert siren blared across campus and in select buildings in its semesterly test.
Notices were sent to students, staff and other subscribers through email; text messages; Facebook, Twitter, RSS feed and website alerts; a TV crawl and ALERT FM radio messaging system.
From the moment Provost Michael Amiridis, chair of USC’s emergency management team, made the call to issue the emergency test to the moment that the final alert tool was set off, seven minutes had past, which Cpl. Vinny Bocchino of USC’s Division of Law Enforcement and Safety said was a “very fast” response time.
The alerts online and on social media went out first, within two minutes of Amiridis’ call, and the last tool employed was the TV crawl, Bocchino said.
Of the 46,716 texts that were sent by the Carolina Alert system, 45,802 were delivered successfully, giving the system a 98 percent success rate.
Text message success rates have hovered around 98 percent for the past three semesters and the 2 percent of undeliverable messages was largely attributed to subscribers entering landlines instead of cell phone numbers for their Carolina Alert contact information.
Emails saw a higher failure rate, with 3.1 percent bouncing back, and 65,955 out of 67,996 subscribers, or 96.9 percent, were delivered successfully.
The unsuccessful attempts faced problems similar to the text messages; subscribers could have old or incorrect email addresses listed, Bocchino said.
This was the first official test of the Carolina Alert system to include the newly installed sirens in the Carolina Coliseum and Rice Athletic Center.
The sirens were installed with recent fire alarm updates and, in the case of the Coliseum, which has poor cell phone reception, will allow students to more quickly receive Carolina Alerts in case of an actual emergency.
“Cell phones are first to get jammed in an emergency,” Bocchino said. “Look at football games. The high usage jams up the cell towers and nothing can get in or out. With these sirens, you don’t need a device to receive the message.”
Bocchino said that these siren systems will be installed with every building’s eventual fire alarm update and that the next to be updated will be the James F. Byrnes Building, Williams-Brice Building, Blatt P.E. Center and 300 South Main St.