In case of emergency

Markham Howe, ASU director of communications said, "The key to emergency response is practice and preparedness."

This is true for both students and administrators, yet many students have said they feel unprepared for an emergency situation and don't know what, if anything, the university would have them do.

"No one has ever told me what to do during an emergency," Matthew Garner, an engineering major, said. "I would probably just get in my car and go home."

A group of engineering students agreed with Garner and said the university should make it a priority to prepare students for the unthinkable.

D.A. Davis, safety supervisor of ASU's Office of Environmental Health and Safety, said the university provided an "Emergency Procedures Handbook" that was posted on kiosks across campus to inform students. However, an inspection of kiosks in five buildings revealed not a single copy.

"I've lived in the dorms for over two years and I've never seen [the Emergency Procedures Handbook]," a pre-med student said.

Other universities have begun to offer emergency response guides online, in addition to the physical copies found on campus. Ithaca College in Ithaca, N.Y., uses this site for example: http://www.ithaca.edu/emergency/pdfs/Emergency_Response_Guide_041108.pdf

If ASU's emergency procedures handbook is available online, a search of more than 40 results through the ASU Web site did not reveal one.

ASU's Emergency Procedures Handbook covers basic steps students should take in the event of an emergency and lists contact information for emergency responders. ASU's handbook covers: fire, explosion, bomb threat, earthquake, tornado and chemical spill scenarios. There is nothing about shooting incidents.

The ASU Emergency Response Plan is organized around the National Incident Management System (NIMS), which was introduced in 2002 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA.)

It's much like the approach used by police officers and firefighters for every incident, according to Davis, who is also responsible for emergency response planning at ASU.

"NIMS is a modular system," Davis said, "meant to be flexible and quick to adapt for any situation."

Davis also said the University Police Department is in charge of emergency situations on campus until outside assistance arrives. 

"In a large-scale emergency all we can do is offer support and equipment to those external forces," Davis said.

ASU currently has more than 50 employees with NIMS qualifications.

NIMS courses are offered for free over the Internet, but Davis is also qualified to teach some courses.

"In emergency situations, things happen too quickly for one person to handle it all," Davis said.

NIMS is designed to create a web-like organizational structure, delegating specific tasks to certain individuals. No person is supposed to have more than seven subordinates.

At the top of the NIMS web is the title of incident commander, usually the police or fire chief, depending on the nature of the emergency.

NIMS is not a response plan, according to the information on the FEMA Web site.

Davis opted not to produce ASU's response plan because of concerns that the information may be used in a future attack on the ASU campus. However, he said the plan is more than 500 pages and was updated in July.

"We're always working to update it," Davis said. "Basically we're just adding annexes to it to cover different scenarios."

Officials had a genuine emergency situation in the effects of February's ice storm, but Howe said due to previous training exercises, the university was able to handle the situation quickly and ensure the safety of the students on campus by beginning to prepare its response the night before.

The ASU Office of Emergency Management had two opportunities to practice in the year before the ice storm: the Twin Towers implosion and the mass dispensing of flu vaccinations last November.