New Emergency Notification System

Brooklyn College

Public Safety Department

New Emergency Notification System at Brooklyn College

In addition to participating in and encouraging the campus community to register for the CUNY Alert emergency notification system, Brooklyn College, under the direction of the Vice President for Finance and Administration, has implemented a new on-campus public address (PA) emergency notification system. This multimodal approach provides a higher degree of effectiveness and efficiency in emergency communications with the Brooklyn College community.

Background

Campus safety – and the ability to provide effective notification in an emergency – is a critical issue. Brooklyn College administrators understand this and are constantly seeking a balance between facilitating an environment that fosters academic and personal freedoms and providing operational continuity, emergency preparedness and life safety protection for students, faculty, staff and visitors. As such, the College is implementing a voice paging notification system that delivers optimal protection by offering a reliable method to provide timely and accurate information to our campus community.

CUNY Alert vs. Brooklyn College PA System

CUNY Alert provides a secure, web-based emergency alert system that sends messages (to those who have signed up) via cell phone (text and/or voice), land line telephone and e-mail. The Brooklyn College voice paging system augments the College’s mass notification plan by offering real-time voice announcement capabilities throughout the physical campus buildings. This arrangement affords Brooklyn College with a comprehensive mass notification program capable of making real-time voice announcements to keep the campus community informed of emergencies and how to respond.

Highlights

The benefits of Brooklyn College ’s new public address system are numerous:

· Voice announcements provide clear, real-time instructions to campus community members for situations that may be rapidly evolving.

· All areas (interior and exterior) on campus can be covered by audio announcements.

· Announcements can be directed to specific buildings or “zones” on the campus allowing control over dissemination of information.

· Voice announcements can reach areas where cell phones and networks may not.

· The voice paging system is exceptionally flexible; initiated from many different locations from both on-campus and off-campus, accessible by various College administrators.

· The College specified a hard-wired system with numerous redundancy features and backup systems resulting in an ultra reliable real-time public address system.

· Students, faculty, and staff do not need to be online to receive important announcements.

System Deployment

Brooklyn College’s on-campus public address notification system is being deployed in two (2) phases. Phase I was completed in August of 2008. The first phase of this project consisted of integrating the public address system into the following four (4) campus buildings.

· James Hall

· Whitehead Hall

· Old Ingersoll Hall

· New Ingersoll Hall

Phase II is currently in progress. This second phase will provide integration of the public address system into the ten (10) remaining campus buildings, as well as exterior campus locations. The College completed extensive site surveys and environmental assessments and is currently reviewing the design package. We anticipate that Phase II activities will commence in the coming months. We will keep the campus community apprised of the project’s progress.

Conclusion

When an emergency happens or is imminent, campus officials must be able to quickly and efficiently alert people in the immediate environment. This new public address system can quickly notify the campus community of threats and advise them of appropriate actions to take to provide for the safest possible outcomes.