VA Tech drafts disaster document

By Billy Mitchell, Collegiate Times

When released, the emergency preparedness document was meant as a consideration for instructors to supplement to their syllabi and discuss at the beginning of the semester.

Titled “Emergency Preparedness?It’s Every Hokies’ Responsibility,” the document gives the acronym “HOKIE” to describe steps in planning ahead for an emergency, as well as steps to take in the event of other specific emergencies like workplace violence and power outages.

Michael Mulhare, who started his position as director of emergency management in November, teamed with Assistant Chief Tom Foster to develop the emergency preparedness document.

“Our main goal is to make the university as disaster resilient as possible,” Mulhare said. “There are four steps to emergency management — preparation, planning, response and mitigation — with the main focus on preparation and planning.”

Foster added that he wanted to create something that provided useful information and was readable and handy.

“The acronym is something people will read because it is interesting, but also gain information from,” Foster said.

While it was at the discretion of professors to include the document in their syllabi, some teachers made safety and emergency preparedness paramount.

“I pointed out the document to my students, and we made a plan for a meeting place in case of an emergency,” said Marlene Preston, director of undergraduate programs for the department of communication. “It makes sense to me to have a plan before an emergency happens.”

But with the distribution of the document at the discretion of professors, there are concerns that some students may never be educated on its content.

Mulhare and Foster feel that this will not be a problem, as this is only one of many up-and-coming angles to emergency preparedness that students will be exposed to in the near future.

“The inclusion of the document is encouraged, but the faculty and staff enjoy a level of independence,” said Mulhare. “Requiring it to be included would take away from this. We are developing a culture of emergency preparedness, and the document is only one part.”

Faculty and staff around the university are beginning to give their feedback on the document and it is mostly positive, Mulhare said.

“From the faculty and staff I’ve heard back from, they’ve mostly been supportive and appreciative of the document,” Mulhare said.

Next in the line for the ongoing development of emergency management is a “desktop reference” that Mulhare said will be about 20 pages and involve more specific information. He hopes to have this available for download from the Internet in the near future. It is currently in draft form.

“There’s a lot of spread-out information with different organizations such as student affairs, the police department, and environmental health and safety. We’re trying to bring it all together,” Mulhare said.

In addition to the emergency preparedness document, there are also several other items that can be found on the police department’s Web site, www.police.vt.edu.

“Students that haven’t seen the document or any other emergency plan can visit our Web site and get the same information,” Foster said. “There’s a slideshow that you can access that runs automatically with the ‘Voice of the Hokies,’ Bill Roth, that covers the same points as the one page document.”

With a campus as large as Tech’s, Mulhare and Foster emphasize the importance of being prepared in any situation and hope the emergency preparedness document will inform the university on how to do so.

“Emergency preparedness starts at the individual level,” Mulhare said. “Anything can happen at anytime, anywhere, so everyone needs a plan.”