Georgia State Optimizes Emergency Mass Notification

Article Appeared in Campus Safety® Magazine May/June 2009 Issue

A major urban university with more than 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students needed a mass notification system capable of delivering immediate notification and instructions if there is an emergency on campus. But timely text, e-mail and phone messages can often be hampered by bandwidth-limitations and lack of flexibility.

Georgia State University is a major research university located in downtown Atlanta, the Southeast's government, financial, retail, health and legal center. The university's more than 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students are spread out among six colleges, surrounded by high-ribuildings, a rapid transit system, and two hospitals, one of which is a Level 1 trauma center.

If a major emergency or disaster takes place, the Office of Emergency Management at Georgia State is responsible for "all-hazards/threats" emergency response and disastmanagement. Like other universities, Georgia State's emergency and disaster management plan is based upon alerting its large population, with its urban environment which has significant ambient noise on a 24/7 basis, depends upon redundant mass notification systems with diverse functionality, including the capability to communicate using live voice.

Challenges - Emergency mass notification via text, e-mail and phone messages vulnerable to bandwidth-limitations and lack of flexibility.

Like many campuses, text messages, e-mails and phone messages are part of Georgia State's emergency mass notification protocol. However, Mike Raderstorf, director of the Office of Emergency Management at Georgia State, believes these methods are limited in scope and effectiveness and are not ideal for maintaining situational awareness during an actual ongoing emergency event.

Time delays: "If we send out a text message, an e-mail message and a phone call letting everyone know that we're dealing with an emergency, it's going to take anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to get that message out to over 28,000 students, faculty and staff, depending upon how much bandwidth is available at that time," says Raderstorf.

Situations change quickly, call for quick response. "Once you send out one message, it's very difficult to send out follow-up messages quickly enough to maintain situational awareness across a large population," says Raderstorf. "Let's say that the situation is cleared, or five minutes later, you find out it's a false alarm. You can't recall that message and say 'all clear.' You have to stop the message, but some people have already received the message and other people never received it. Then, you must give an all-clear message."

High Ambient Noise Makes Notifications Difficult to Hear
The Georgia State campus is located in an area with significant ambient noise on a 24/7 basis. Not only are there many high rise buildings, but the campus is located next to Grady Memorial Hospital, a Level 1 trauma center, and MARTA (Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority), Atlanta's public transportation system of subways and buses. According to Raderstorf, "We compete with a lot of noise. When you start to crank up the amps as loud as you can with a normal 360 degree speaker array, the first thing that you're going to notice is that you're going to have substantial echoes, which basically mitigates your sound systems."

Solution - IML SoundCommander SC-360 and AlertCommander for redundant and simultaneous emergency notification.

If there is a major emergency at Georgia State University, the fastest method for the Emergency Management department to get out an emergency alert is with the IML SoundCommander SC- 360 mass notification system, Raderstorf believes.

"I could literally drop the phone and broadcast a message on our campus in about five seconds," says Raderstorf. "With any other system that I have, I have to go into the computer or type in some type of PIN access code, go through a couple of different screens and then, generally even with my best practices, it would take me a couple of minutes to actually get that message out. With the SoundCommander SC-360, notification is practically instantaneous."

Outdoor Speaker System With Intelligible Full Live Voice
However, the most important reason that Georgia State University went with IML, according to Raderstorf, is because of the overall sound quality that they get from the IML SoundCommander - 360 Emergency Mass Notification Loudspeaker and Alert System.

"We have a very, very unique challenge in that our ambient noise level is 70 decibels on a 24/7 basis. The other vendors did not have the overall audibility and voice clarity that we need in an environment like ours."

Implementation includes optimal decibel threshold assessment Rsderstorf has lots of experience with technology implementations. "I've worked with many companies and vendors to know that technical installation and engineering teams vary greatly in their level of competence. When we bought the IML system, I felt like we bought a whole staff that came with it. It wasn't just 'we're going to install your system and walk away'."

He was impressed that IML not only programmed the speaker arrays themselves, but their implementation team positioned the actual arrays on top of the buildings and then did the actual decibel testing. And during the testing process, the IML implementation team found something unique to Georgia State University.

"IML identified that we need a minimum of 10 decibels over the ambient noise to understand a live voice. And, simultaneously, it has to be 10 decibels over to ascertain that a horn is going off. That's the threshold for us to make it work. That was a big point for us because we didn't know that's what we needed when we were testing other systems. IML not only made sure that our system is up and running and ready to use, but they made sure that can you hear it over the ambient noise in our situation."

Horn Emergency Alert 'Grabs People's Attention'
Georgia State also needed an alert sound that is unique from the regular noise.

"We are right next door to Grady Memorial Hospital, so we hear sirens going pretty much constantly. The horns and sirens in your loudspeaker warning system need to be very distinct from the ambient noise around you. Many companies come with pre-packaged sirens, so when you activate the siren, it sounds just like a police siren. That not a good solution for us," says Raderstorf. "Plus, we're close to MARTA rapid transit trains so we need something unique that doesn't sound anything like the MARTA trains. The Sound Commander's horn sounds like a massive freight train. It's an eye opener - and it definitely grabs people's attention!"

Trust Live Voice
Georgia State University always uses both the horn and voice and does not use pre-recordings as part of their mass notification protocol.

"With some systems you can pre-record your warning message, but it doesn't actually give you the ability to pick up a hand mike and say whatever you need to say," says Raderstorf.

"We like our students to know that when we activate the system, there is somebody live on the other end giving important information. We also let them know that we will not utilize the outdoor speaker systems without following up with some other type of emergency communication."

Raderstorf also noted that, "Using pre-recordings means that there is always a chance for a false alarm. You can't have a false activation with live voice. We would always use siren and voice."

Intelligible Live Voice Capability
Does Raderstorf have any recommendations for other universities considering implementing a speaker system?

"I've got a lot of colleagues that say, "hey we're thinking about putting up a speaker system and we just want pre-recorded voice and siren. What are your thoughts about that?" Says Raderstorf

"It's great if all you want people to do is look up and hear a voice or a horn or a siren. But you have to have someone behind it. You can't train everybody to listen when they hear a siren and know that this is what you need to do. The siren and horn can mean different things on different days. One day, it could be a severe weather tornado warning alert, and the next day, it could be somebody running through campus with a weapon. The key component is the voice capability. I tell people, if you're going to go with an outdoor speaker system of any capacity, make sure that it has full live voice capability."