USC’s emergency alert system worked well in a test Thursday afternoon, but many new students and faculty may not have gotten the message.
Going into the test, 60 percent of first-year students and employees hadn’t updated their contact information, said Cpl. Vinny Bocchino, USC’s emergency manager. That’s far more than the number of existing students who hadn’t: just 4.9 percent.
Still, those students and employees would have received some form of the Carolina Alert test, Bocchino said; all university email addresses are automatically enrolled.
“If we don’t have your information, we can’t message you in an emergency,” Bocchino said.
Before this semester, officials did not check to see how many students had updated their information, so they don’t know if the 60 percent figure is typical.
But the switch from VIP to Self Service Carolina may have contributed. Before the move, VIP prompted users to update their information if they hadn’t already. Self Service Carolina does not.
USC hopes to bring that function back in the spring semester, Bocchino said in an email.
Other functions of the test went smoothly, he said.
Six new indoor sirens, which are built into fire alarms, worked well. They had been installed recently at the 300 Main Street engineering annex, 516 Main Street offices, Blatt Physical Education Center, Booker T. Washington Complex, James F. Byrnes Building and Williams-Brice Building.
Bocchino said the test saw typical sending success rates: 97.9 percent of 47,900 text messages went through, as did 99.1 percent of emails.
Those issues mostly had to do with users whose university email addresses were out of date, many using mailbox.sc.edu or older domains. Their active addresses would have received the message, though, Bocchino said.