The Red and Black

The email/text/phone alert system was a joke. I didn't get any notification of the storm until it had already passed. What is the point of notifying me of an emergency when the emergency is already over?

Probably because you were in the basement of a building...

So was there actually a tornado? thats honestly all i wanted to find out. The rumors in aderhold were a tornado was 5 miles east of downtown...

You have got to be kidding me. We were back in our offices at least 30 - 45 mins after the storm had passed before we received any phone alerts, emails or anything about it. I am confused as to why praise is being given to this system when it obviously needs A LOT of work before it can be any where close to useful. I was expecting an explanation as to why it failed so poorly, not a write up about what a good job it did.

I am going to have to say that it was not all that great... though I do not know exactly whose fault it was... my message was sent about 30 min after the warning was in effect. And it said the warning would be in place until "_______ o'clock."

-Dustin
http://www.ugaliberal.com

UGA Alert still has a way to go before it is truly effective in a severe weather alert. The alert ended at 2:30 and I got the e-mail at 2:35 and the phone call at 2:45. It's a good thing I heard the tornado siren. That could be louder too. UGA Alert people... I hope you're taking notes and tweaking your system. We're not quite there yet.

Anyone who was on campus yesterday knows darn well that the UGA Alert system didn't do its job well enough. Some staff didn't receive the notice from UGA Alert until nearly an hour after the system started sending it because of the university's antiquated phone system. The e-mail notification contained a blank instead of the end time for the weather warning.

All in all, it would have been more helpful to have a weather radio yesterday than the UGA Alert system. What did our tax money go to pay for?

If I were a parent of a student, I'd be afraid for my child. Since guns are about to be legalized on this campus, what if there's another school shooting like at VA Tech? Will it take an hour to get the word out? How many people might be affected?

And how did the 5 R&B reporters not get this side of the story? Surely they experienced the delayed alerts themselves, these kids and their technology.

UGA Alert, as it currently exists, is a deeply flawed system that MUST be fixed.

I was standing at bus stop while the alarm was going off. there were buses around us but no one told us anything so we just stood there for ten minutes while the alarm went off. naturally none of us had gotten the alert notification, so i'm going to say that the situation was handled VERY poorly. Had the tornado actually been anywhere nearby, we probably would have still been standing there. so when you put a "plan" on the table, make sure if encompasses ALL students on campus--NOT just the ones on buses or in buildings.

The actual tornado warning came from the National Weather Service at 2:01 pm, according to their Web site. What happened in the meantime? Was there decision making whether to use UGAAlert or not? Or did they immediately hit "send alert" as soon as they got it and it took this long to get out.

According to a staff member in the Office of Security and Emergency Preparedness, there was a significant delay (something like 10 minutes) between the time NWS issued the warning and the time they even tried to activate UGA Alert. The alert system itself didn't perform adequately even after that, resulting in calls to CAMPUS phones coming as late 3:00. OSEP has already admitted that the delay was unacceptable and they are reportedly working to prevent the same problems from occurring again.

No offense to those running UGA's "alert system," but the National Weather Service (NWS) issued the tornado warning for Athens-Clarke County at 2:01 p.m. The county's sirens went off shortly thereafter. Notifying the students 10-15 minutes after the fact is hardly sufficient, especially considering the NWS sent out another bulletin at 2:13 p.m. stating that Doppler radar still indicated a tornado in the county. If I were a parent of a UGA student, I'd be pretty upset if my child were receiving his or her first notification of a possible tornado after this second OFFICIAL bulletin was released.

I think that it was handled poorly as well. I was at work, with the power out before I got a message from UGA. And I didn't just get one. It was back to back messages saying that "yes, there is an alert", "the alert has ended", "there is an alert", "the alter has ended"....this went on for about 10 minutes. Nice.

I agree with all the comments above. The alert system performed jokingly. I received my warning about the warning some 30 minutes after, well, the warning.

Red&Black, please ask some questions instead of just cutting and pasting stuff we already know:

With whom, if anyone, does UGA contract for its alert system? UGA (or R&B) should seriously ask that contractor whether their system can deliver 30-35K messages in a timely fashion. Who writes the messages?

Or did traffic in local cell phone towers delay the delivery of the messages? Etc.

Let do some investigating on this, someone. Don't just report. Investigate.