Big Plan on Campus: Disaster planning for colleges and universities

When it comes to disaster planning, a college or university poses all the challenges of a small city — plus a few of its own.

A college or university campus is something like a cross between business and a small (or not-so-small) city. So emergency planners in the academic world face many of the same issues their public-sector and corporate counterparts do, as well as some issues that are unique to higher education.

Campuses vary widely in size, but larger universities will often have their own police forces and even hospitals. They can house varying numbers of students and have the full range of food services needed to feed both residents and commuters, as well as faculty and staff members. Even smaller commuter schools will function like small cities unto themselves.

"We're very much like a city," says Vicki Stover, who as associate vice president for administration for California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo wears multiple hats, including emergency planning for the campus, which is mostly a residential school, as opposed to a commuter school.

She explains that people think that because Cal Poly – SLO is one school, everything is in one building. "We have over 100 buildings on campus, and we have a lot of property because we're an [agriculture] school."

"The fact of the matter is that we're a business," says John N. Petrie, assistant vice president for public safety and emergency management at George Washington University, in the U.S. capital. "Our product is the graduate. If we cannot complete a semester, we have got a major disaster."Others mention keeping payroll going, and Petrie adds all the university functions that mimic what a bank does, what with taking in money and handling loans. "We have all the same financial issues a bank does. We have to keep all of that functioning."

Part of the Tulane University campus under four feet of water two days after Hurrican Katrina hit. It took about a week overall for the water to go dwn in this partof the campus. (Tulane University OEP)

Plenty of differences
But there are also things that make academia different. For example, no city or business faces a turnover of roughly a quarter of its population every year. The core population of any college or university, the students, is essentially transient. Whether they live on campus or commute, students are rarely at a given school for more than four or five years.

"They're in and out," says André LeDuc, director of the Oregon Natural Hazards Workgroup for the University of Oregon, in Eugene. He's a researcher whose work involves taking students out into communities to help design emergency response plans.

But not only is the population constantly changing, there's the added issue that many of the students don't come from the surrounding area.

"We have 56 countries represented among 1,800 students," says Bruce McDougal, director of safety at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. In addition, his office must also keep abreast of where his students are going, as Colby has several international programs.

"We're kind of a mini–United Nations around here," says David White, special operations associate for the president's office at Tulane University, in New Orleans. "We have so many foreign students and when an evacuation is called, they can't just hop a plane and go to China."

Which White knows from personal experience, having overseen the emergency planning at the university through Hurricane Katrina last year.

And with students, often there are parents, who become concerned about incidents on campus, adding yet another layer of people to communicate with when something happens.

In 2003, after a Colby coed was abducted and murdered, McDougal says, "We had parents calling, demanding that we call the National Guard — and we had other coeds continuing to jog at night."

Which is another unique challenge of the campus population: Most undergraduate students are, well, young.

"They're not paying attention," says Steve Charvat, CEM, director of the Office of Emergency Planning for the University of Washington's three campuses, in Seattle, Tacoma and Bothell. "The typical undergraduate, they think they can live forever. Disasters are something they'll deal with when they get out in the real world."

Troops of the Oklahoma National Guard assemble on the Tulane campus. This unit of about 300 personnel was quaretered in nearby Gibson Hall, the university's main administration building, for three weeks. The tent in the background held communications gear.

"You've got a collection of bright young adults, but they're not world-wise," McDougal agrees. "They tend to do things that are not in their best interest. That is an interesting monkey wrench that is quite often thrown into the planning process. We had a student reporter work his way into a burning building once."

Irreplaceable assets
Another challenge for campus emergency planners is that not only do they have the lives of their students, faculty and staff to consider, they also have the research much of their faculty is working on to consider, not to mention priceless, irreplaceable historical documents.

"We do stem cell research, weapons of mass destruction," White says about some of the research on the Tulane campus. "There's samples out there that if you lose them, they cannot be replaced. We have special collections here, we have original diaries. We have the jazz archives. We had a lot of them get flooded, but we brought in the company pretty quick to do the freeze job." He adds that there's a person on campus who's specifically responsible for research assets.

Treacy Malloy, senior emergency analyst for the University of California – Berkeley, and LeDuc both believe that providing the resources for the respective departments to put their own plans into action is best.

"Our plan isn't as specific," Malloy says. "We help the different departments develop their own plans, because they know what they need. We provide templates and a framework. It is their research. They're the ones who know best how to protect it."

Getting them to do it, on the other hand, is a whole other matter. Malloy sighs audibly when asked about getting researchers just to back up their data. "It's very difficult to get a pure academic researcher to think about anything but his research. We are making inroads, but it is taking a very long time."

"Researchers are in sort of their own world," Charvat agrees. "It's usually after the fact that they think about it. It's one of the biggest difficulties breaking through on the academic side, getting these people to think about the unthinkable. It doesn't have to be a disaster. It could be something as simple as a pipe breaking over the file cabinets."

"Most faculty don't back their data up," LeDuc says, adding that it's becoming a bigger issue as more and more people rely on laptops and wireless connections. It's much harder for a university to include Prof. A's data in their back-up processes than it would have been had Prof. A been relying on the university's mainframe computer for data storage.

"People aren't plugged in. Part of it's personal responsibility. If you've got five years of data on your laptop and you don't back it up…."

LeDuc sees his part of the job as to provide the tools and training for researchers and others to back up their data. And while he can't drag researchers kicking and screaming into backing up their data and otherwise make plans to protect their research in the event of an emergency, he does want to make it as easy for them to do it as possible.

"We have to make sure we give them the resources so that they feel empowered to do it," LeDuc says.

While he hasn't made any plans to yet, he does agree that nagging can be part of a plan. "And that's where grad students come in. We can train up a small army of students who can go around and give sessions on data back-up."

Student recruitment 
Which points up that some of the greatest challenges on campus can also be among the school's greatest assets. That said, aside from some student volunteer programs such as Colby's emergency response group (in which students get emt training for on-site medical first response), McDougal, Stover and Charvat note that the transient nature of the student population makes it difficult to include them in emergency planning.

"Because we are an undergraduate institution, the turnover happens so quickly that by the time a student is up to speed on the institutional emergency response priorities, they graduate," McDougal says.

"We focus on the staff," Charvat says. "They're going to be here much longer than the students."

Relying on staff and faculty members, who tend to be the people who stay, also makes it easier for training. "The people that participate stay, so it's old hat for them," Stover says.

Still, Malloy sees students as " a huge resource. They have so much energy and so many ideas."

Some Berkeley students, along with interested faculty and staff, are trained in light search and rescue and other emergency skills. Malloy agrees that it's a very difficult thing to maintain, but worthwhile.

LeDuc also agrees that using students as a resource has its limitations, but he finds that a better way to approach it is to link student training to part of the university's overall mission to educate. In fact, he began pressing officials at the University of Oregon to start pulling together emergency plans because of his student experiential learning program, which has students working with civic leaders on their emergency plans.

"You're looking at it as a service you're providing for the student," says LeDuc, adding that students can't replace the staff needed to effectively do emergency planning and training.

However, if emergency planning training is open to students, not only is some of the work getting done at a fraction of the cost of hiring staff members, the students are leaving with knowledge that they can apply no matter what their eventual career path.

"This is the beautiful thing about that dual mission," LeDuc says. "They've been exposed to [emergency planning], they understand the systems."

On the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the University of California —Berkeley hosted a management-level exercise simulating the aftermath of a quake similar in scale the notorious 'Big One.' (Steve McConnell/UC Berkeley NewsCenter)

Education, connection …
In fact, the Ready Campus program is a partnership of colleges and universities in Pennsylvania that's geared toward providing support to their surrounding communities in times of crisis through use of college facilities. A major component of the program is providing students with service learning opportunities.

"Students can provide a great deal," says Helen Speziale, Ed.D., of College Misericordia, the program's contact person. " On a simple level, they are physical support: sandbagging, doing intake, etc.

Depending on their majors, they may have additional skills to add to preparedness/response: nursing, communications, business, physician assistants.

" Having students learn about the resources they can bring to the community in times of crisis is critical. As future citizens of communities, they need to understand the civic responsibility they have to their community; our program advocates doing this using service-learning as the model. Using their professional backgrounds has the potential to create a highly qualified, active citizenry in the future."

White notes that not only are students a tremendous resource (Tulane's president recently instituted as a graduation requirement that students spend time doing service-learning projects that will aid in the rebuilding of New Orleans), but the university itself often has resources to offer the community as a whole. For example, with no public hospital available since Katrina, residents from Tulane's medical school have been providing health care.

The research being done at the schools can also help, as witness LeDuc's work. He's actively using his research not only for the local communities, but to build the University of Oregon's plans. Tulane is now offering a degree program in emergency planning.

Connecting with other universities is also a vital resource. The University of California is actually a system of 10 campuses. Malloy says that they all have varying degrees of emergency management staffing, but that she's in constant connection with the different  campuses.

" They're incredible resources," she says. " For instance, if we have a major earthquake in this area, I'm presuming that ucla will still be intact."

Such coordination can help not only in reviving vital functions such as payroll, but also in blending academic programs for students and faculty at a closed school.

In addition, says Malloy, " We've been talking to Tulane and we've been trying to learn from what they went through."

… and communication
Another project is a new people locator that was developed partly in response to the issues Tulane faced after the school's extended closure last fall.

White says that the storm itself wasn't so much the problem. "We were pretty prepared for the storm. The thing we weren't prepared for was being closed for six months. Had the levees not broken and the city flooded, we'd have been closed for a week."

The closure exposed a major problem: With students and faculty spread literally all over the country, communication became next to impossible. When clean-up crews came, it was difficult to know what needed to be salvaged and what could be thrown out without the specific researcher there to say, and it wasn't always possible to contact the researcher, simply because university officials had no way of knowing where that person was.

The result was a new call center where that all employees can call in on an 800 number and let people know where they are, as well as to find out what's going on back at the university.

"Communication was a big thing for us," White says. "We've addressed that by having this call center." Another new requirement is that each department, not just key departments for the running of the university, must have its own hurricane plan.

An essential part of emergency planning is also working closely with the local police, fire and civic leaders. LeDuc found this out when he began working with the City of Eugene and the county, which were planning on using the university for housing people in the event of a disaster, while the university was planning on using several of the city and county resources.

"It was the expecting resources from each other and if an event would have happened, there would be mass confusion," LeDuc says. "It's vital to know what the other expects. "And there's general agreement that drills and exercises are vital.

"You can never plan for the un­plannable," White says, "but we like to think we've run tabletop exercises under a variety of different scenarios." Malloy says that her people are getting so well trained that it's hard to surprise them anymore.

But, of course, surprise is what everyone is getting ready for, because whether you're planning for terrorist attacks, pandemic flu or local threats such as hurricanes, earthquakes or wildfires, what's mostly likely to happen is what you don't expect.

As Malloy puts it, "Any emergency manager that says we're ready for anything is just not paying attention."