Preface

I am a United States Coast Guard Auxiliarist. Because of this affiliation, I was able to work as a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster assistance employee (DAE) in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in September 2005. The devastation to homes, schools, hospitals, and businesses that I witnessed in our country had a life-changing effect on me. The people I met and the stories I heard motivated me to become involved in helping to increase an awareness that through emergency preparedness some aspects of a disaster or emergency could be mitigated. I was appalled and astonished that such devastation could occur in my country. After a month of working as a community relations person, assisting survivors in locating resources that were available, I returned home to New York. I joined the local Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), an organization whose focus is to train people who live in the community to provide for their own safety and the safety of their neighbors until assistance is available from professional emergency services. It was then that I began to rethink my dissertation focus.

At the time, I was a college administrator working on my doctorate. Because of my experience with Hurricane Katrina, I began to explore emergency preparedness in colleges and universities. I had been toying with looking into some aspects of the adult education marketing arena, but my time in New Orleans made me think about the vast numbers of students who had been displaced from their home institutions. From the freshmen who had only spent a few days at their new schools, to the sophomores, juniors, and seniors seeking the opportunity to continue their education; life as they knew it was forever changed. This natural event changed the course of many lives at educational institutions—faculty, staff, administrators, as well as students. I wondered what colleges and universities could do to retain their students when their buildings became uninhabitable. I wondered if these institutions had emergency preparedness plans in place and whether there was anything that they could have done to lessen the interruption to the educational process on their campuses. Thus, I began my venture investigating what guidance was available through the United States Department of Education (DOE) and FEMA.

As I reflected on my past administrative positions and the colleges where I had worked, I realized that at least two of these three colleges did not have adequate emergency preparedness plans in place. One of these institutions did not even have fire drills for the administrative buildings, only for the dorms. At one college, the entire emergency preparedness plan was written by one person, who had no prior experience working at a college. I saw fire extinguishers with inspections that were well out of date, students climbing a 40-foot lighting apparatus in the theater with no tethers, and professors who continued to teach during fire drills because they did not know if it was a real fire. I witnessed a blackout once in July on a 100-degree day where the residence life staff had no alternative plans in place for the tower full of students other than to run to Home Depot to buy flashlights. Events such as these happen every day across the country at countless colleges. It is my intention to simply call attention to the guidelines that are available for colleges and universities to follow that could help reduce the risk and help mitigate those situations that are unavoidable.

During my doctoral inquiry period, 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech were shot to death in April 2007 when one emotionally disturbed student went on a rampage. This horrendous event exposed problems in emergency response at that college campus. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident. The next year, in Northern Illinois, an alumnus returned to campus with a guitar case loaded with three handguns and a shotgun. In a geology lecture hall, he stepped from behind a screen on the stage and opened fire, killing five students and then himself. Yet three years following this horrific event, a New York Times article, “Colleges Fail to Complete Required Safety Plans” (Pawlowski & Manetti, 2011), reported that even after the State of Illinois put a law into place that required colleges and universities to put emergency preparedness plans in place, very few were in compliance. Sadly, these types of tragedies continue to plague our society. During the first month of preparing this manuscript, holiday shoppers were gunned down in a Seattle mall, and then 2 weeks before Christmas, 20 first graders, 3 of their teachers, their principal, and the school psychologist were murdered at the hand of a psychotic individual armed with an assault rifle as they began their school day in Newtown, Connecticut. Tragically, what is occurring in our schools is a microcosm of what is occurring in society at large.

The purpose of this resource book is to assist colleges and universities in developing and organizing their emergency operation plans in a manner that is easy to read and understand, and incorporate all of the key components recommended by FEMA and the DOE. I have seen far too many campus plans with information that is not pertinent intertwined with critical information, directives for action by students mingled with action items for the preparedness teams, and repetitive unedited information, and some missing critical information. This resource book contains a NIMS/ICS compliant template (see Appendix A) for creating a campus emergency preparedness plan, which is designed to help campus teams develop plans that contain all pertinent information in an orderly, coherent manner so that information can be readily obtained. The information in this resource book has been extracted from FEMA and DOE documents and training programs. Additionally, there are concepts and pieces of plans from countless college and university emergency plans that were melded together to provide the reader with strategies for protecting, preventing, mitigating against, responding to, and recovering from threats and hazards that may materialize at an institution of higher education.

Reference

Pawlowski, S. M., & Manetti, M. (2011, December 23). Colleges fail to complete required safety plans. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/education/chicago-area-colleges-fail-to-complete-safety-plans.html?_r=0