|
A good and efficient Emergency Warning and Mass Notification system is a system that:
- Able to notify occupants and personnel within seconds during emergency situations
- Uses 'live' and pre-recorded voice messaging and visual alerts to instruct people what to do
- Will notify all people during an emergency situation, including public areas and non-listed occupants
- Will be able to initiate different alert instructions to different buildings/zones
- Will be easy to install and expand into new and existing buildings/facilities
- Provides the facility owners with full control of the system design, operation and reports
- Uses reliable communication lines that are not prone to fail during emergencies
- Can be integrated with in-house systems like Fire Alarm, Security, Access Control, etc.
- Can initiate mass E-mail and Phone messaging during non-emergency situations
- Uses client owned FCC license for all system wireless activity.
- Will have a remote backup 'Hot Standby' system in case the main system is down.
- Backed by a company with large customer base and years in the wireless paging market
A good place to learn about what are the basic needs from a Mass Notification System is the Department of Defense UFC 4-021-01 document, published in December 2002 after the 9/11 events - "Mass notification is the capability to provide real-time information to all building occupants
or personnel in the immediate vicinity of a building during emergency situations. To reduce the risk of mass casualties, there must be a timely means to notify building occupants of threats and what should be done in response to those threats. Pre-recorded and live voice emergency messages are required by this UFC to provide this capability".
It is clear from the above document that a Mass Notification System must have the capability to instantly broadcast voice instructions that will tell people
what happened and instruct them what to do. The instructions should be customized for each building and zone to match its unique evacuation plan. Other instant alerts as public area LED displays and strobe lights are important too for the hearing impaired. E-mail text messaging and phone message distribution alerts can be used in non-critical situation or as a secondary option, due to their relatively slow notification process, lack of ability to notify everyone and the tendency of communication lines
to fail due to overload during emergency situations.
The AlertWave System:
The AlertWave system provides security and safety administrators with full control to plan and manage how to warn the masses during emergency situations. In case of emergency the AlertWave system can initiate in an instant (within seconds!) wireless voice and data alerts to
an array of wireless public address speakers, LED displays and strobe lights located in rooms, floors, buildings and public
areas. In addition the AlertWave system can send text messaging to pre-defined e-mail lists or pre-recorded voice messages to a pre-defined phone list.
Other Mass Notification technologies:
Many campuses and municipalities chose recently to implement other mass notification technologies based on text or phone messaging. These solutions are a fast 'patch' and relatively inexpensive. Close look at these technologies can easily show that they are not effective and at times useless due to one or more of the following reasons:
- Too slow when every second counts
- Need people to answer the phone or check e-mail - ineffective during meetings, class or night time
- Can't notify people that are not on the alert list like visitors and public areas
- Can't generate an area specific instructions as it can't tell where subscribers are located during alerts
- Uses unreliable communication lines that are prone to fail during emergency situations
- Place the facility safety in a third party hands without much control during emergencies
A sad way to learn about the disadvantages of E-mail and phone messaging emergency notification systems, we can learn from a recent tragic event at LSU on Dec. 14th 2007. As can be seen from this Associated Press news article (check the highlighted areas), the alert was initiated hours after the events brought to the university authorities attention, the university authorities
didn't know why the alert
wasn't received by most students, the university got no control on the situation as an outside service was in charge of initiating the alert, there were no good reports to how many of the students actually received the alert, many students elected not to be on the phone list for various reasons, and more. Similar results were earlier that year in the Virginia Tech incident, as the E-mail and cell phone systems went down due to overload, leaving students wandering what happened and what to do
for hours. This is an example to a situation where most students should have been instructed to block all the entries to their building, while the students and personnel in the building under attack should have been instructed to evacuate the building at any means.
|
