Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Support the IDS in College Media Madness! Donate here March 24 - April 8.
Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

Director of Emergency Management answers questions

Campus Filler

On a daily basis, students may see a passing a cadet on duty in Ballantine or a few squad cars driving around Bloomington.

However, there are two departments — Public Safety and Institutional Assurance and Emergency Management and Continuity teams — that are relatively unknown and account for another large part of campus safety. Within these umbrellas fall responsibilities from tornado drill training and instructions to tips on personal preparedness and safety.

Director of Emergency Management and Continuity Ken Long is responsible for helping campus with planning and training for certain emergency situations. One of the more typical procedures he oversees is campus fire drills. He answered a few questions about general drill practices in terms of campus safety procedures.

Indiana Daily Student: On average, how many fire drills do you do per 
semester or per year?

“Well, let’s work it backwards, OK. We probably have about 225 buildings that require drills of some sort, and depending on the type of building and the occupancy dictates how many drills are done for that building. So, a housing building for example, we do four a year. An administrative building, we do two. Classrooms would be two. There are a couple facilities that it’s required monthly, like a childcare.”

Typically, would you say people pulling the alarms is an issue, or does that not happen as frequently as we would assume?

“False alarm probably isn’t a good word because we have alarms that are triggered that may be due to mischief but could be due to popcorn, something like popcorn, which could be a problem. So, you can’t say it’s a false alarm. You somewhat have to define it when you say. Was there actually a fire? Maybe not. But was it something that could have been an unsafe condition? Anytime an alarm is activated, it’s an unsafe condition because when that occurs, the fire department gets dispatched, and when the fire department gets dispatched, you’re putting people in harm’s way because they’re trying to get to something to save life and property. So the potential, every time an alarm is activated, there’s risk involved. I don’t want to say that it’s false. I think that’s kind of a bad way to talk about it.”

“We’ve talked to the Bloomington fire chief, and we’ve had meetings to discuss what we could do better, and we’ve tried to emphasize, in the dorms especially, to be conscious about making popcorn. It sounds like maybe overkill to a point, but it’s really not. If you burn your popcorn and that smell, it can produce smoke and then that would trigger an alarm that would be the potential for something to happen negatively.”

How frequently do you guys double-check the alarms to make sure the testing is good?

“That’s the purpose. That’s part of the reason we do evacuation or fire drills. It really is a three-fold purpose. We want to test the equipment. So when we do a fire drill, an evacuation drill, what we do is we work in concert with the EM-Lock department and we go to the buildings. We actually activate the alarms, often times, we’ll get a person that works there to work with us, they like to actually activate it, so we test the equipment to see if the alarms will sound. Often times there’s strobes, lights, that activate, so we test that equipment. Secondly, we want to validate our emergency action plan. Our plan says what to do in case of a fire and we want to validate that the plan is a good plan, that people evacuate the premises and then go to an assembly area. And we want to train, not only the people that are occupying the building but we have what’s called Building Incident Management Team or Emergency Control Committee and they get the opportunity to practice part of their purpose. Their purpose is to help facilitate incidents that may occur in the building, so when there’s a fire, what they want to do is help guide people out of the building to an assembly point. So they get to practice that.”

In the summertime when student enrollment isn’t what it is during the fall or spring, do you do testing then as well?

“As a matter of fact, we strategically schedule our training. We do it early in the semester when students first arrive and we do it after class hours, so it’d be in the evening, I’m talking about at the dorms, that way the students are familiar with what occurs during a fire drill, which affords the opportunity for the RA’s and the housing managers and what we locally refer to as the Emergency Control Committee to practice what their procedures are, so we do that in the beginning of each semester, in the evening. Then in the summer time, we do it during the day, that way, it’s typically staff, often times people that work in the kitchen or people that do the facility maintenance or upkeep, they get to practice also. So, by strategically timing when we do the drills, it affords us the opportunity to train additional people, that way, we’re reaching everybody ­— day crew and night crew, staff and faculty and students.”

Get stories like this in your inbox
Subscribe