Western Courier

Issue date: 2/1/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Adam Sacasa Text messages, e-mails and phone calls are all part of Western's new emergency alert system.

Between 9:50 and 10:23 a.m. on Tuesday morning, 17,515 people received emergency text messages, phone calls or e-mails from Western Illinois University. Every student, faculty and staff member of Western has contact information listed and received a message one or more of these ways.

Students need not fear their safety - the message was only a test of a new system being implemented across Western's campus.

According to interim Director of University Relations Darcie Shinberger, the system's intent is to inform students of events that may harm them.

"The way we've described it is as any serious threat to the safety (of students and faculty)," Shinberger said.

Assistant Vice President of Student Services Dana Biernbaum said the system would not send messages to students as reminders for class registration or other general issues.

"We want to make it clear it is not our intent to use (the alerts) for other purposes such as general announcements," she added.

Shinberger emphasized this point, saying that it is for emergency use only because they want people to take the alerts seriously.

"We want people to realize (that) when they do get a call or a message from the number or the e-mail that this is something we really need them to know and be aware of so we can keep everyone as safe as possible," Shinberger said.

After running the test, an error occurred in the e-mail portion of the alert, and some e-mails went into a folder of the recipient's account instead of the inbox. The issue has been identified and corrected. If the system were to be run again, the mail would go to the correct location, according to Shinberger.

"Ninety-six percent of our e-mails were sent successfully," Biernbaum said.

The entire test took roughly half an hour.

"One of my staff members received a phone call at 9:51, an e-mail at 9:52 and another (call) at her home at 9:55," Shinberger said. "She wrote down the times for me so I would know how instantaneous it almost was for a lot of people."

Biernbaum said the test took around half an hour because of the capacity of the system.

"Through our telecommunication service we can accept 430 incoming calls at one time, so the vendor provides a solution for that," she said.

She added that the telecommunication services paced the incoming calls to campus so they would not overload the system.

"That's why there's some delay from the moment we initiate the message to the time when some folks get their message," Biernbaum said.

Both Shinberger and Biernbaum encourage students to log on to www.wiu.edu/alertsystem to confirm the information listed for them is correct.

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