Are we really safe?
Andrew Castillo
Issue date: 4/30/07 Section: News
|
"I encourage you to review and become familiar with the College Emergency Response Quick Reference Guide, which outlines steps you should follow in the event of an emergency or disaster," O'Hearn said in the e-mail.
The Quick Reference Guide, which can be found on the Mt. SAC homepage, is essentially an abbreviated form of the college's overall disaster plan. It focuses on the types of crises that may occur on campus and where students should gather in the event of an evacuation. For such an event, the campus is divided into four quadrants (W,X,Y and Z) with evacuation points in each parking lot.
"We had our director of fire technologies, who used to be a fire chief for the department of Anaheim, help us develop the plan. This is similar to what law enforcement or what we call first responders want us to do," Director of Safety, Health Benefits and Risk Management Karen Saldana said.
When students head to those evacuation points, they should expect to see security and faculty members organizing students and relaying directions, Assistant Director of Security Mike Montoya said.
Montoya also said that reacting to disasters is not always best and students should be active in reporting any suspicious activity. Located throughout campus are blue emergency phones that connect directly to the security office for just that purpose, but the current Quick Reference Guide does not accurately depict all of those locations.
According to the map there are no emergency phones around the stadium in quadrant Z and none near Sherman Park or the horticulture units in quadrant X.
"When we made the map, the ground lines for the phones were there, but not the actual phones, so we didn't want to list those locations without the phones in operation," Saldana said.
Since the map's release emergency phones have been installed around the stadium. Sherman Park and the horticulture units remain without emergency phones.
Aside from the additional emergency phones, the current plan is being revised to meet federal regulations. The NIMS, National Incident Management System, is a product of the Homeland Security Act and must be added to the campus disaster plan. Updating the current plan, which meets state regulations, and meshing it with the new federal requirements is not a hard task.
"When the NIMS were made they actually looked at the California regulations because they've been very successful … The NIMS and the SIMS [State Incident Management System] mesh really well," Saldana said.
Regardless of state or federal regulations, accidents and emergencies will happen.
"We can never predict emergencies," Montoya said, "but we can prepare for them."
Be the first to comment on this story