October 11, 2004

Comic Disaster Relief

Posted by Kieran

Today my University is carrying out a Disaster Preparedness Exercise, simulating “campus and community crisis responses” in the face, I think, of a series of imaginary industrial explosions. The Physical and Atmospheric Sciences building was evacuated, but so, unfortunately, was Social Sciences. They didn’t do that one on purpose, though. Industrial accidents, even imaginary ones, seem much more likely to happen in PAS. The only chemical present in dangerously high quantities in Social Sciences is caffeine. Nevertheless the building has been shut down since 8am, the power is off, police tape is everywhere, guards are posted and fake victims with fake injuries seem to be wandering around. At least, I think the guy with the bandaged leg was faking. Maybe I should have given him a kick to make sure. From talking to the cops and listening to the radio chatter, my theory at the moment is that the power failed in Social Sciences, possibly as an accidental byproduct of the fake disaster, and now not only can they not figure out how to turn it back on again, everyone is so busy tending to fake victims and cleaning up non-existent industrial waste that there are no staff available to fix the problem. So, in effect, the hypothetical crisis has managed to generate a real one.

It’s just as well that it’s only an exercise. I was out in the parking lot with everyone else for an hour, waiting in vain to be allowed back in. It’s bad enough that we were all allowed to hang around by the doors, breathing in putative anthrax or notional dirty bomb fallout. But then a flatbed truck carrying large flammable and quite real gas cylinders came up the driveway and parked behind the fire engine to make a delivery to the chemistry department. About ten minutes after that, two forty-foot tractor trailers pulled in to deliver props and stage equipment to the Centennial Hall theater. They might have been full of anything. If the Trojan Horse itself arrived at the main entrance to the University today, I swear a fat guy in a day-glo vest would have waved it through saying, “Just hurry it up there, we’re trying to co-ordinate an imaginary emergency here.”

Posted on October 11, 2004 11:14 PM UTC
Comments

Hah! It’s White Noise!

Posted by Jared · October 11, 2004 06:33 PM

Jared beat me to the punch.

Posted by Brad · October 11, 2004 09:16 PM

As reluctant as I am to say anything good about security, the real benefit of such drills is that you discover things that do go wrong and figure out how to prevent them.

One them might be that you need to have the chemistry dept.’s delivery schedule so you can call Praxair and tell them to stop their sodium hydroxide delivery when you have an actual disaster.

You might also discover that killing the power to the physics building trips a relay at the Sociology building.

You can then plan and and take action on those problems.

Posted by Mark · October 11, 2004 09:40 PM

This reminds me of the bomb scare in Wallace Hall at Princeton in June, 2003. Nothing had ever made me feel as unsafe on that campus as the way public safety had handled the situation.

Posted by eszter · October 11, 2004 11:26 PM

If everything went according to plan, it wouldn’t be a disaster, now would it? Then you’d need to have “Minor Incident Preparedness Exercises” or “Slight Boo-Boo Drills”.

At least now you know that when something happens it will actually qualify as a disaster and possibly even hit the national news.

Posted by Josh · October 12, 2004 02:50 AM

Be Prepared

Posted by s_bethy · October 12, 2004 03:23 AM

If your social sciences building is like my engineering school building, it does contain a cafe with an oven that can catch on fire. Which, funnily enough, caused all the real evacuations I ever went through at uni. We suspected the fire engineers of regularly pulling pranks.

I do recall being evacuated from the chemical engineering building once and standing at the designated evacuation point speculating with my friends about what all the tanks nearby contained.

Posted by Tracy · October 12, 2004 08:15 AM

If your social sciences building is like my engineering school building, it does contain a cafe with an oven that can catch on fire. Which, funnily enough, caused all the real evacuations I ever went through at uni. We suspected the fire engineers of regularly pulling pranks.

I do recall being evacuated from the chemical engineering building once and standing at the designated evacuation point speculating with my friends about what all the tanks nearby contained.

Posted by Tracy · October 12, 2004 08:16 AM

If your social sciences building is like my engineering school building, it does contain a cafe with an oven that can catch on fire.

In my experience, the presence of something like a cafe is one of those things that distinguishes engineering from social science buildings.

Posted by Kieran Healy · October 12, 2004 03:06 PM
Followups

→ well, that was sneaky.
Excerpt: it would appear that congress back-doored a major reinforcement to the solomon ammendment over the weekend. regardless what you think of the substantive issues involved, this move seems misguided and heavy-handed: The provision, which was borrowed from...Read more at riting on the wall

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.