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RFH 2010, Colgate News

Another Step Toward a Safer Colgate

Tue, Jul 20, 2010

Another Step Toward a Safer Colgate

This is just a test ...

Some time yet this summer, it is likely that village residents are likely to hear the latest addition to Colgate's emergency notification system: alerts broadcast to the campus over several large public address speakers attached to the smokestack on the heating plant.

This is the latest addition to the university's efforts to imprpve the notification system used to alert faculty, staff, students and others should an emergency occurr, according to Campus Safety Director William Ferguson.

Police agencies just performed a hostage rescue/shooting exercise at Hamilton College.

In May, the university installed five outdoor public address speakers on the heating plant smokestack. The outdoor public address speakers are intended to provide warnings to persons on campus that are not inside of buildings or are not part of Colgate’s other emergency notification system. Ferguson said these warnings include but are not limited to:

  • Any incident with a strong potential; for serious injury or loss of life,
  • Very severe weather, i.e. tornado heading for campus, microburst, dangerous lightning affecting campus,
  • An active shooter on or near campus,
  • Any other situation that may present a strong potential for serious injury or loss of life.

The outdoor speaker system will augment the VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) telephone system and be an addition to the other emergency notification programs that send messages regarding emergencies and warnings on campus.

Colgate University’s emergency notification system consists of several programs with varying communication capabilities and redundancy. The programs are intended to rapidly disseminate emergency information on an incident, and provide instructions to the campus community.

In 2006 in response to the Higher Education Act amendments of 1998 Colgate instituted a "campus alerts" protocol on the campus email system. Emergency information is sent via this system to all faculty, students and staff to their Colgate email addresses.

Also in 2006, Colgate Campus Safety contracted with ‘e2Campus’, a mass notification product for the purpose of communicating to registered campus community members via email, voicemail, and text messages to those who additionally opted in for this feature on their cell phones. This program is currently being replaced by a different mass notification system ‘Rave Alert.’

Last year, Colgate installed a VOIP telephone system. A component of this system is ‘INFORMACAST’ which allows for pre-recorded messages or live voice messages to be distributed to all on campus VOIP system telephones.

Village residents will be notified in the media when the alert susyem will be tested.

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