The first emergency sirens test Wednesday
was met with reactions ranging from indifference
to applause, while many did not hear the
siren at all.
Shortly before the test, which took place
at MCV and Monroe Park campuses, camera
crews crowded the space between James Branch
Cabell Library and Shafer Court Dining Center.
At noon the siren sounded, and most students
barely broke stride. Many didn’t even look up
from their books.
“I didn’t know anything about (the procedures),”
said Patrick Gilman, an urban studies
and geography major. “There weren’t any
instructions that I knew of.”
One student briefly displayed a sign stating
“This is only a test,” while another attached
an amplifier to a laptop and prepared to blare
noise back at the siren.
The planned procedure for students was to
seek more information when the sirens sounded.
Television screens in major academic buildings
and student housing, and text-message alerts
were tested in conjunction with the siren.
University librarian John Ulmschneider said
students should have been more interested.
“It was a test, but people should have heard
the alarm and at least wondered what was going
on,” Ulmschneider said. “Many students at tables
appeared not to have heard it. And many did
not pick up their cell phones.
“I will be sending a suggestion to members
of the administration that inside a building like
Cabell Library, where it’s crowded and busy,
the siren is scarcely audible,” he said.
The concern was echoed by sculpture
major Paul Shoemaker, who was in the Fine
Arts Building on Broad Street when the siren
sounded.
“I tried listening for (the siren) intentionally,
and I couldn’t hear it,” Shoemaker said.
Shoemaker did, however, receive the emergency
text messages. A series of three messages
were sent to students, staff and faculty who had
signed up through the VCU Alert Web site.
John M. Bennett, senior vice president for
Finance and Administration and “incident commander”
in the event of campus emergencies,
addressed questions about the loudness of the
siren shortly after the test.
“Remember that two things are going on
simultaneously: The siren is rotating and the
pitch is changing,” Bennett said. “So if you
happen to be in the radius of the circle where
the pitch is at its lowest point, and the siren
has rotated away from you, it’s going to sound
less loud than if you’re at the high point and
it’s pointed right at you.”
Bennett said the administration will be
evaluating the results from 23 sound meters
placed throughout campus.
In a Wednesday night
e-mail update to the university
and health system
communities, Bennett said
that based on an initial assessment,
the sirens worked
as designed, but “the sound
was not as loud as we
had expected, and sound
penetration within some
buildings was low.
“To some, the up-anddown
pitch of the first siren
sounded like a fire truck
or ambulance driving by,”
he said.
Bennett also addressed
inconsistencies in the length
of time the text messages
were received.
“Actual delivery of a
text message depends on
our vendor distributing
text messages to each commercial
carrier and the speed with which the
carrier delivers the actual message to your
phone,” he said.
Monroe Park Campus Student Body
President Jessica Lee said she thought the
test was a success, but the reaction displayed
the difficulty of informing the student body
how to react to an emergency.
“Either the administration has done a really
good job of letting people know it was a test,”
Lee said, “or the whole thing was a bad job
because nobody cared.”