UF's first full-scale emergency notification test a success

April 18, 2008

The first full-scale test of the University of Florida’s emergency notification system concluded at noon today and proved successful, both in terms of what went well and what officials learned needs improvement.

The test, which began at 9 a.m., involved text messaging, e-mail, automated telephone messages to campus buildings and postings on UF’s home page. The simulated scenario involved a gunman on campus firing shots, and participants in the exercise included The UF Police Department, Environmental Health and Safety, Student Affairs, Housing, Web Administration, the UF News Bureau and others.

Preliminary results indicate that of the 56,795 registered cell phone numbers on record, 4,395 did not receive a text message. The reason for the gap was unknown Friday afternoon, and the final breakdown of the text messaging test may not be available for one to two weeks.

The e-mail notification went to 92,065 addresses, and all arrived within an hour.

For the automated telephone notification system, three campus buildings were involved in the exercise: Rawlings and Broward residence halls, and Rinker Hall, which houses the School of Building Construction and other units. The first calls to 770 student cell phones and landline campus phones in those buildings were placed beginning at 9:06 a.m. and took nearly 7 ½ minutes. At least 93 percent of those calls reached those phones, records show.

The second round of calls was placed about 15 minutes later to the same three buildings plus other buildings within a 650-foot radius of them, for a total of 1,100 phones. That took nearly 10 ½ minutes to complete, and the message appears to have reached at least 89 percent of the phones called.

Finally, the first message on the UF home page was posted within six minutes of the beginning of the exercise. An alternative positioning of that message to make it more prominent was posted about 40 minutes into the exercise.

However, two issues emerged that are being addressed:

1) Nearly 4,400 cell phone numbers did not receive the text message. UF and Mobile Campus, which provides the text messaging service, are working to determine why that occurred and correct it.

2) Emergency e-mails were labeled as coming from the person who sent them, which in this exercise was a police administrator. To avoid confusion or the possibility that recipients might ignore the emergency e-mail if they don’t recognize the sender, future e-mails will be labeled as coming from a more authoritative source, such as “UF ALERT,” with a subject line that reads OPEN IMMEDIATELY.

Full-scale exercises such as today’s will be conducted at least once a year, with tests of the text messaging system only to be conducted twice during the fall semester, twice during the spring and once over the summer.

Anyone who did not receive the text message should go to http://www.it.ufl.edu/emergency-test/.