[Photo: High water flood marks could still be seen at Southern University at New Orleans four months after Hurricane Katrina struck. Courtesy of Marvin Nauman/FEMA.]

By sharing ideas and experiences, university emergency management teams are making sure they're as prepared as possible for an on-campus disaster.

They're connecting on the Disaster Resilient University listserv, networking with other emergency managers and researching best practices in emergency management. And whether they face an earthquake, a shooting or a tornado, the best emergency management programs work together with campus and community stakeholders during the planning process.

The University of Central Florida is trying to improve its emergency management plans and procedures by looking at what other universities are doing. Professor Naim Kapucu sent an online survey to more than 450 members on the Disaster Resilient University listserv, which is hosted by the University of Oregon Emergency Management Program. He also sent the survey to universities that received a 2008 Emergency Management for Higher Education Grant or were part of FEMA’s Disaster Resistant University initiative.

In the results published this month, 13 percent of the 160 respondents said they were confident that their universities qualified as disaster resilient, and about 18 percent said they agreed that their universities qualified as disaster resilient. A consensus definition of disaster resilient doesn't exactly exist, but Kapucu defines it this way: “It’s more proactive and having an implicit, explicit cultural preparedness on campuses. So we’re not waiting until a disaster happens. We use training, we use exercises, we use constant communication with students, faculty and staff at the university setting to make sure they’re prepared.”

Nearly 75 percent of survey respondents said they had significant support from university leadership. Kapucu hasn't completed his analysis of the results yet, but mentioned that a University of Central Florida advisory committee will create a framework for a comprehensive emergency management plan based on the findings. He said that ideally universities would collaborate on a national master document that identifies which campuses have detailed plans and who to contact for more information on them.

Start Planning

To prepare campuses for an emergency, university staff members need to look at emergency management standards and determine what they have already done as well as what they need to do, said André Le Duc, director of the Emergency Management Program at the University of Oregon and the Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience.

“The best takeoff point for a campus is really to get its head into the standards and do that self-assessment to figure out what it has and how it would bring it all together," Le Duc said.

Those standards come from the National Incident Management System, National Fire Protection Association and Emergency Management Accreditation Program. They are required if universities want to receive federal grants to help them recover from a disaster.

Business continuity is a big part of emergency management programs because universities don't really have an option to close, unlike city and county governments, said Le Duc, who is also the vice chair of the Universities and Colleges Caucus of the International Association of Emergency Managers. In the 3-year-old Emergency Management Program at the University of Oregon, Le Duc is creating more comprehensive mitigation plans, conducting a business systems analysis, assessing risks, and understanding the connections between infrastructure, buildings, instruction and research.

For example, he's assessing campus rooms to determine which ones depend on electricity, steam and water, and how those sources can be protected. “The beauty of a campus is you can actually do much more enhanced risk assessment work than you could, say, at a community because spatially it's a small area," Le Duc said.

Constantly Plan and Prepare

As with many large institutions, different people in various areas of the campus don't look at emergency response the same way. That's why universities need to take an enterprisewide look at what they're doing and coordinate with different departments on campus to form a strategic plan.

“Where a lot of campuses have been able to excel in emergency management is through a unified program where it isn’t that you develop a new emergency management program and then that’s the end-all-be-all," Le Duc said. "It’s more that they serve as that senior administration to coordinate all the components, assure that nothing's falling through the gaps, yet set forward, 'OK, these are the areas we need to improve,' and then do it kind of through a team effort."