Preparing for an incident
The University has spent the last five years regularly updating their protocol and running through drills to improve their emergency response techniques.
John Petrie, assistant vice president for public safety and emergency management, said that the University’s incident teams engage in regular exercises that are designed to put GW’s administrators and response team in a real-life emergency situation.
“We’re not throwing softballs at people it terms of what it is we expect them to deal with as a challenge during an exercise,” said Petrie. “We’re giving them things that we didn’t just make up, we’re giving them things that actually do happen in the world.”
He claims that the scenarios are so accurate that events of every exercise actually occur within three months of the drill. The scenarios include situations involving terrorism, natural disasters, man-made disasters, and even traffic accidents, said Petrie. He would not go into specifics about the scenarios and would not say if Monday’s Va. Tech incident was a scenario that has been practiced.
The exercises serve as a learning process. “We have not yet done an exercise where we haven’t identified something that we can do to improve our plans,” he said.
In fact, as of last weekend, the incident manual guide, the lists of emergency procedures available online for every student and staff member, has been updated 174 times since its original post in Sept. 2002.
In addition to the training scenarios, the incident teams are equipped with the latest technology that allows that to communicate efficiently in times of emergencies.
Petrie described a number of mechanisms in which the teams can contact each other almost immediately after an incident occurs, no matter where they are. These include conference bridges, that allow a closed network of callers to send and receive emergency alerts to one another and collaborate over the phone en route to an incident.
The University has also set up an agreement with one communications provider to designate GW’s incident team as “public safety priority.” This gives the response team special access to the mobile grid even when the carrier is pulling regular users off of the network. GW is joined by only the Secret Service and emergency management agencies belonging to the government, said Petrie. This status allows the University to make calls and send messages to people during an emergency even when everyone else’s phone does not work.
In addition, the University has established a variety of partnerships that helps them in their emergency response effort. Petrie listed off a number of prominent organizations with whom GW collaborates to “make sure all the folks in the area know what to expect from one another if there’s an incident around here so that we’re not working at cross purposes,” he said.
The list includes Georgetown, the World Bank, IMF, Red Cross, Federal Reserve, MPD, FPD, EMS Service, DC Homeland Security and Management Agency, the Council of Governments, Department of Homeland Security and Metro.
“You don’t want to be exchanging business cards at an incident,” he said. “You want to know the people who you’re working with.”