UConn’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) recently hosted a Sport and Special Event Evacuation Training and Exercise course at the Storrs campus on March 8 and 9. The course was put on by TEEX, Texas A&M Engineering’s Extension Service. This branch of TEEX is federally funded by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The multidisciplinary audience spent two days reviewing best practices regarding the preparation and implementation of a venue evacuation plan. The following topics were covered:
The importance of a well-defined approach to planning and managing an evacuation using the Incident Command System (ICS) within the National Incident Management System (NIMS) framework
The essential components of developing an evacuation plan
The concepts of planning and implementing an evacuation plan for sport venues
The effective measures that ensure the evacuation emergency plan reflects the current operation strategies, organizational structures, and methodologies utilized by evacuation personnel
Participation in a training exercise involving key partners and evaluate outcomes in order to address gaps and ensure an increasing level of preparedness for evacuations
UConn’s OEM was excited to host this training and is always exploring new educational opportunities for the Division of University Safety and the rest of our University partners.
March 15, 2016 (Falls Church, Va.) – Members of the U.S. Council of the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM), the premier international professional association representing more than 5,000 professional emergency managers worldwide, including more than 4,200 in the United States, believe there is serious confusion and misunderstanding of the use of the term “emergency manager” in the press and public related to the Flint, Michigan, water situation. Traditional emergency managers focus on preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters or crisis situations. The term “emergency manager” has been used to describe those in the business of saving lives, protecting property, and restoring communities for more than 40 years.
“One thing must be made absolutely clear: the term ‘emergency manager’ in the Flint, Michigan, situation refers to a fiscal-only function that bears no relationship to the term as it is commonly and universally used on a national and an international basis,” stated Robie Robinson, IAEM-USA president. “In the context of the Flint situation, emergency managers are actually municipal ‘emergency financial managers’ (EFMs) established by the Michigan legislature and appointed by the governor to oversee jurisdictions in Michigan that are threatened with financial insolvency.”
The use of the term “emergency manager” to describe these appointed financial managers in Michigan has generated an incredible amount of dangerous confusion for the public, especially since the Flint issue has now become a national story. Dedicated emergency managers across the country now are being forced to address questions that underline a misguided sense of concern about the role of an emergency manager. Unfortunately, an impression is beginning to take shape that emergency managers exist to “cut budgets and reduce costs at the expense of community safety and security,” Robinson noted, when indeed the exact opposite is true. “This confusion is damaging community confidence in real emergency managers both in and out of Michigan, and in doing so it is making our communities more vulnerable,” concluded Robinson.
IAEM urges all media, members of government, and other leaders to educate the public, and help clarify that, in Michigan, an individual who is appointed to oversee a governmental body or jurisdiction because it is threatened with financial insolvency is not an “emergency manager,” but rather an “emergency financial manager.” Further, real emergency managers work every day in support of University Safety agencies, local volunteer and service organizations, businesses, the media, and everyone in between, striving to build relationships in their communities to help keep people safe. They cannot do this without the trust of the people they serve.
In this Feb. 4 photo, UConn police block off a section of Fairfield Way as university workers attempt to fix an outage. Another power outage occurred on Feb. 25 and affected students living along North Eagleville Road and Route 195. (Zhelun Lang/Daily Campus)
For some, the morning of Thursday, Feb. 25 began with a strange noise of a reset alarm clock. For others, their lights went out during a late night cram-session. But most students probably woke up to morning whispers or social media messages about an incident that passed unnoticed in the night.
Just before 1:30 a.m., the high winds of the thunderstorm damaged circuit #3, which caused power outages along North Eagleville Road and Route 195, including North Campus, Towers, Husky Village and East Campus.
The exact cause of the outage remains unknown, but natural forces during storms often cause damage to the power grid. Windswept debris, falling branches and direct lightning strikes are common storm hazards that are not easily preventable.
“In this particular outage, there were no electrical fires or electrical emergencies reported to the fire department,” Deputy Chief Gregory Priest said. The UConn Fire Department (UCFD) did assist, Priest said, by playing a “supportive role to our partners in Facilities.”
Their first objective was to establish situational awareness by becoming a part of an Incident Management System (IMS). The IMS provides a structure for centralized information distribution and decision making.
In this case, UCFD’s Command Staff and Office of Emergency Management responded to the Division for University Safety’s Emergency Operations Center.
“The staff that make up the Emergency Operations Team is dependent on the incident,” said Christopher Renshaw Captain of the OEM. The roster for a laboratory outage may be different than the one for a residence hall blackout.
The next support step includes, “verifying the function of emergency egress lights, and ensuring that the fire alarm systems are functioning on battery power,” Priest said.
To repower the circuit, Facilities Operations and Building Services (FOBS) was contacted by the Fire department and immediately activated their Emergency Response Team. They worked side by side the crew of Eversource, the utility company that helps power the university.
“It was a fantastic effort and partnership between our crews,” Associate Vice President of FOBS Mike Jednak said, “especially in the wee small hours of the night.”
The partnership worked for four hours until 5:30 am, when they fully restored power to the circuit. No other significant issues were caused by the power outage, and classes began as scheduled.
Despite the unpredictable nature of lightning storms, FOBS performs, “preventative maintenance to the entire electrical infrastructure to minimize risk,” Jednak said.
To help incident response, FOBS has a phone request service, the Work Order Control Center (WOCC).
For emergencies, students should call in a Facilities Emergency to 860-486-3113. According to the WOCC’s webpage, “an immediate or imminent threat to life, or severe property damage,” is assigned Priority code #1, the highest level of request.
