The Great California Shakeout
On Thursday, October 15, at 10:15 am, 6.9 million Californians participated in the largest earthquake drill in U.S. history.
The purpose of the Great California ShakeOut was for Californians to practice how to protect themselves during earthquakes, and to get prepared at work, school, and home. Schools, civic centers, and institutions from around the state participated in the drill.
I’m proud to note that more than 40 AlertU client schools were a part of this effort to make us all safer.
AlertU from Waterfall Mobile provides mobile alert messaging for enterprises, institutions and school campus communities, and enables easy and rapid communication with registered users via text messages.
AlertU successfully provided emergency notification mobile messaging to the schools during the earthquake drill, and was crucial in the colleges’ efforts to successfully complete the simulation.
During the drill, AlertU was used to send mobile alerts to registered users with instructions on the “BIG ONE” and to “Drop, cover and hold” within minutes of the simulated earthquake.
Participating AlertU schools included:
- City College San Francisco
- Golden west College
- Coast Community College District
- Coastline Community College
- Chaffey College
- Rancho Santiago Community College District
- Santiago Canyon College
- Santa Ana College
- Canada College
- Skyline College
- San Mateo City College
- Orange Coast College
This forward-thinking exercise was a great way for these communities to test their emergency preparedness, and I’m proud Waterfall Mobile and AlertU got to be a part of it. As the Associated Press noted, an exercise of this scale provides invaluable data to hospitals, institutions and first responders.
To all of our client participants – congratulations on a job well done!
(Jason Saroyan is the AlertU business lead at Waterfall, and believes being in the know beats being in the dark…most of the time anyway.)
