SWAT Cleared Campus, Text Messaging Kept Community In The Know
Last week’s 10-year anniversary of the Columbine tragedy – and more recent school shootings that have benefitted from lessons learned in hindsight – continue to remind us how critical timely emergency communication can be during a crisis.
Last week Napa Valley College, our very first AlertU client back in 2007, became the latest successful example of how emergency notification services can get urgent news out to an affected community, potentially averting more disastrous consequences. The college was put on lockdown when two armed men ran onto campus after allegedly robbing a West America Bank customer at gunpoint outside the bank in the Riverpark Shopping Center around 1 p.m. Police and SWAT were immediately brought on campus to search for the suspects.
While officers combed the campus property, college officials communicated with students and faculty in real-time. The school’s emergency communication plan – which included SMS, e-mails and website posts – enabled school officials to relay news immediately, ensuring the safety of students and faculty during a campus scare. Text messages warned subscribers that armed men were on campus and that people were instructed to stayed locked in their classrooms until SWAT team members secured the area.
Several of us at Waterfall Mobile were at a favorite lunch dive in SOMA at the time, and began receiving these alerts as part of our monitoring process (we sign up for every school). We quickly called our engineering team who were back at the office monitoring the SMS message flow through our platform and out via our aggregator. It was a tense yet smooth next few hours as, like the students on campus, we continued to receive the text messages and hoped for a safe outcome.
“During last week’s emergency, AlertU was an integral part of our campus’ emergency communication plan and helped us get urgent news out to our students and faculty,” said Ken Arnold, Chief of Police at Napa Valley College. “AlertU has a simple interface that made it easy for us to post frequent updates. This is a community service that you hope to never have to use, but when you do, it’s great to know that it works just like it’s supposed to, quickly and efficiently getting emergency news out to the community.”
The first text message went out to subscribers at 1:31pm, explaining to faculty and students the situation and warning them to lock themselves in their classrooms. As the search for the suspects continued, officials updated students and faculty via text with a total of 8 messages sent over a 4-hour period. More subscribers joined the service as the day went on, with the last text going out at 5:21pm, notifying the community that the campus was clear and the suspects were in custody.
Talking to Jason (who heads up our AlertU division) after the fact, it became clear that a convergence of multiple technologies helped keep people safe. One text alert could reach 1000 people who could alert 1000 more through a tweet, an email or blog post. That’s the viral world we live in.
Through the hard work of all the security personnel involved it was a successful end to an anxious day for Napa Valley College, and we here at Waterfall Mobile and AlertU were proud to be a small part of it.
