The E-mail That Came Too Late for Virginia Tech Students

[RedGlitter]

By Josh Hirschland



Created 09/05/2007 - 2:23am

On April 16, as Seung-Hui Cho wreaked havoc at Virginia Tech University, somebody was in a room across campus, writing an emergency communication to students and faculty to warn them of the danger. This was a difficult statement—it had to include information when little was available, and it had to keep panic to a minimum while conveying the situation’s seriousness. Unfortunately, it came too late.

Cho shot his first victims at 7:15 in the morning. A Virginia gubernatorial panel found that it took until 9:26 for an e-mail stating that there had been a “shooting incident to be sent out. It wasn’t until 9:50—after Cho had sent a package to NBC News and the second phase of the attack had already begun—that the first explicit warning was sent to students. The 31 students who died in the second wave of attacks were in class, unaware when the author of the warning e-mail clicked send.

The result: at a time when the world is more connected than ever, the 33 students who died in the worst mass shooting in American history never saw the second message which could have saved their lives.

“A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows.

Under the mantra of “never again—and in an attempt to insulate themselves from the kinds of criticisms that have fallen upon Virginia Tech President Charles Steger—several schools including Columbia are investing in emergency communications systems that will allow for rapid mobile updates. Virginia Tech is leading the way, instituting a system that will allow it to send messages via cell phones, e-mails, and instant messages to students in case of an emergency.

Columbia is in final negotiations with two vendors to bring the emergency system to campus.

Any single emergency notification system will have problems. If it’s based on e-mail, the message can lag between sending and receiving, and most students aren’t constantly checking laptops in class or on still-rare blackberries while walking across campus. If the system is based on text messages, people without cell phones or those who don’t accept texts are still left out. If it’s a phone call, nobody who is in class will pick up. And what happens—as happened on Sept. 11, 2001, or during the regional blackout of August 2003—when an entire cell network or server gets overwhelmed?

To that end, Columbia has ensured that the system will have redundancy upon redundancy. In the case of an emergency, messages will be sent via voicemail, e-mail, and text to the approximately 40,000 members of the University community.

According to Rosemary Keane, assistant vice president of strategic communications and planning for Student Services, the system will “hunt students, reaching out to multiple points of contact provided and prioritized by the user until it can confirm that the message has been received. Furthermore, these systems are interactive—if there is a fire in a dormitory, students will be able to respond to a text message indicating that they have gotten to safety or that they are stranded and in need of assistance.

And if all else fails, Lisa Hogarty, executive vice president for Student of Administrative Services and the one in charge of implementing the system, assured in an interview that the University would employ old-fashioned communication techniques including fliering and the radio to get the message out. There might be something to be said for going back to air raid sirens or the methods of Paul Revere.

Administrators are hoping that the system, which Hogarty said will cost the University less than $100,000 annually, will enter a community-wide test phase as early as October.

True, technology can only go so far. If anthrax is let loose on campus or somebody goes on a shooting spree, the University still has to figure out how best to protect students and what the message to be blasted should say. And even if everything goes right, it may still have no effect—the Virginia Tech report found that, even if everything had gone perfectly, there was still no feasible way to lock down the whole campus. Tell that to the guy who was in that room typing furiously away in an attempt to save student lives.