Employee Forum Covers Emergency Response At Duke

Kyle Cavanaugh, Duke's vice president for administration and emergency coordinator, provided a behind-the-scenes view Wednesday of the decision-making that goes into alerting the Duke community about potentially life-threatening situations.

For Cavanaugh and other emergency management leaders, the past few months have included a string of incidents: an earthquake, hurricane, tornado warnings and a bomb threat.

"No two incidents are exactly the same," Cavanaugh said during Primetime, Duke's online employee forum. "They each take on their own personality. There is clearly nothing that we take more seriously than the overall  safety of our students, faculty, staff and the thousands of visitors that we have here at Duke on a daily basis."

During the live webcast from Duke Studios, Cavanaugh discussed the university's emergency management process, decision-making and the communication channels used to notify the campus community in emergencies. He also answered questions sent by email from the community.

Cavanaugh began the conversation by providing a look at how emergency management has evolved. It was not so long ago, for example, whenDuke used fax machines and phone trees to notify community members in an emergency.

"Over the last five years we have seen a lot of development in this space," Cavanaugh said.

He noted the creation of a standing emergency management steering committee representing each of the major functional areas on campus, the addition of emergency coordinators in each department and the DukeALERT mass notification system, which includes email, text, sirens and web communication tools.

"We have the capacity to send out 65,000 emails in several minutes to all of our students, faculty, staff and other individuals that need to know in the community," Cavanaugh said.

The DukeALERT system also includes a web alert that automatically takes emergency news from emergency.duke.edu and cascades it to a prominent alert bar on websites across the university. Currently, the web alert bar has been implemented on about 50 school, departmental and administrative pages.

During Primetime, Cavanaugh took listeners through thedecision-making process that goes into choosing which communication tools to activate for each incident. For example, he said, soon after learning of the bomb threat on the morning of Oct. 1, police investigators had information to believe the threat to be a hoax. The decision was made to not activate the sirens. Instead, updates were posted on the Duke Today website and an email was sent to students. 

"If this had happened at 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, the response would have been different," Cavanaugh said.

For some weather events like a hurricane or snowstorm, the process is different because Duke can plan in advance, he said. Whenever severe weather is forecast, Duke's severe weather action team members, which include representatives from transportation, police, facilities, communications andother operations units, gather to plan and prepare to ensure Duke can maintain operations in severe weather.

Cavanaugh described a few of the many preparations done in August for Hurricane Irene, ranging from facilities staff cleaning drains to ensure good water drainage, to having contractors at the ready for speedy removal of downed trees.

"Our support staff responded phenomenally," he said. "When bad weather roles in, sleep is at a premium. It is not just me, but the team of people behind me who are up through the evening and early in the morning."

Cavanaugh also took questions from the community, including one about the need to send alerts about crime "in the wee hours of the morning." Cavanaugh explained that the federal Clery Act requires higher education institutions to provide "timely warnings" of crimes that potentially pose a serious or continuing threat to students and employees.

"By law, we are required to send out timely warnings not only to our students, but to faculty and staff," he said.

Emergency communication tools will evolve at Duke, as the institution learns from experiences and technology improves, Cavanaugh said.

"We envision the tools getting better and better over the next couple of years," Cavanaugh said.

He reminded listeners that overall, Duke is a safe place.

"We do have crimes of opportunity, and people need to take common sense precautions," he said. The most important thing faculty and staff can do to protect their safety "is to understand the tools we have and what our communication modalities are."