Go Above & Beyond for Effective Emergency Communication/Notification
Gone are the days when emergency communication just meant going to a fire panel and making an announcement over the public address system. With today’s technology options, why not take advantage of all the possibilities?
If you want to see how far technology has come with emergency communication and notification capabilities, look no further than Virginia Tech, a university campus that experienced two shooting events. The first, in April 2007, left 32 people dead. During that event, it took several hours to alert everyone on campus. When another unfortunate event occurred a few years later, the campus — which had instituted a multi-layered approach to notification after the 2007 tragedy — was better prepared, says Doug Hoeferle, global offering leader for building communications, Honeywell Building Technologies, Atlanta.
“The first Virginia Tech shooting took four hours to notify everyone on campus. The second one … the entire campus was notified within 30 minutes,” Hoeferle says. That event resulted in two deaths — a police officer and the shooter. While any loss of life is tragic, Hoeferle points to improvements in technology, integration and “layering” as the key to keeping as many people safe as possible, whether the event is a mass shooting, fire or weather event. “They used eight layers, including social media,” he says.