Stickybuffalo.com

in the wake of virginia tech and NIU, the university of iowa implemented an expensive emergency notification system that’s supposed to phone, text or email you when bad shit happens.

today, in response to a particularly horrific early-morning domestic murder, the system was activated. it worked beautifully, by all accounts, in that most university students, faculty & staff were notified instantaneously that bad shit had happened and/or was happening. however, the information we all received was not only vague and incomplete, but also inaccurate and at least an hour too late to have been of any help in the first place.

here’s what i’ve been able to put together in an hour of surfing local news: a man apparently killed his wife and children in their home and fled in a beige minivan, only to crash the vehicle on the freeway a few miles outside of town, killing himself. someone — presumably either the killer or one of the victims — called 911 at 6:31 a.m., and police arrived to find everyone dead. the vehicle crashed some time between 6:30 and 7.

i was still sound asleep when all of this happened. but i was awake at 8:13, in time to take a confusing phone call from a mushmouthed robot warning in broken english of an “active shooter” in “the area,” and urging me to call 911 if i should spot a white male in his mid-40s driving a beige minivan. the robot said i could press * to hear the message again, but hung up before i could hit the keypad.

and that was it — nothing about where the alleged shooting was going down, no instructions as to whether i should stay inside or go to campus as normal. i fired off calls and IMs to various university people, who were all equally confused. a few minutes later, the robot called back to clarify that no university buildings were threatened, and that people should stop calling the police with questions, but that we should definitely report any “speck-fick” (specific?) information regarding the whereabouts of the suspect.

this would be the same suspect whose charred corpse was already cooling on the roadside at least an hour before the emergency warning went out. the murders happened on the opposite side of town, as far away from campus as it could possibly have been. what’s more, the “active shooter” stuff — apart from being distressingly non-specific — was completely bogus. the local cops, naturally, are being pretty tight-lipped about details, but have told reporters that they are “not sure” where the university got that idea, adding that, “to [their] knowledge, no firearms were involved.”

so, to recap: this morning approximately 40,000 people got scared out of their wits by a robot phone call dispensing information that was neither timely, nor accurate, nor relevant, nor even comprehensible, leaving them with no clue what to do other than flood police and emergency dispatch phone lines. the net result is an unnecessary communications train-wreck, and a remotely plausible excuse for students to ditch class. a less-than-auspicious maiden voyage for the Hawk Alert system.

maybe it’s unfair to criticize the university for this thoroughly muddled response. in truth, had this been a real campus emergency, even scant or faulty information would have been preferable to none at all. and it’s hard to blame the decision-makers for jumping the gun — memories of the 1991 Gang Liu murders are still fresh for many around here, and the rash of shootings at other schools naturally has people on edge. it’s understandable that nobody wants to go down as the guy who failed to act at the first sign of trouble.

still, none of this inspires confidence in emergency preparedness efforts around here. all it really demonstrates is that this country is still borderline-retarded with fear, and our little liberal oasis of enlightened thinking is no exception. but the object lesson here, for those who are looking for one, should be that instantaneous high-tech emergency notification — if mishandled — can create more problems than it mitigates.