Silent alarm

On Tuesday night the VCU siren went off accidentally. According to inRich.com, “a technician working on the emergency alert system’s siren . accidentally set off the siren for less than one minute.”

Although it has not yet been confirmed by VCU authori-
ties, reports of the siren also going off Wednesday around 10 a.m. circulated. On Wednesday, immediately after the siren reportedly went off, the VCU homepage had an alert posted that stated the alarm was accidental. The alert was removed from the Web site by Wednesday afternoon. VCU authorities could not be reached as of press time for clarifi cation and would not confi rm that the Wednesday siren even sounded.

To go for the horrible pun, this is nothing short of alarm-
ing. The fact that vital information about the safety of our campus was hidden and that even local news organizations could not receive an immediate explanation is a travesty.

Imagine worried students and parents not being able to fi nd out whether a horrible tragedy is happening on their campus. This scenario, you might observe, sounds oddly familiar.

Parents and others criticized Virginia Tech offi cials for not responding fast enough to the April shootings last year. Among the chief concerns about their handling of the situation was that offi cials waited two whole hours before sending out an e-mail stating what had happened at the initial shooting.

With the way VCU is handling their alarms, the very ones installed to deter this kind of scenario, VCU is falling into the same trap. Information about campus security is being removed from the Web. Not even the VCU Alert page reads anything about the accidental siren. We have, in effect, an expensive system that doesn’t work.

VCU is trying to give the illusion of safety without actually providing it. There are text-message alerts, but they are only effective if every professor allows students to have cell phones on in class. VCU bought new plasma screen TVs to put around the school as part of the plan, even though the old ones imparted the same information. Most students are not properly informed about what to do if they hear an alarm and will just ignore them if they keep being set off accidentally. VCU needs more than one e-mail and a few randomly placed posters around campus to educate students on what to do if an event should take place on campus.

Luckily for VCU offi cials, most students ignore the alarms anyway. The majority of VCU students just confused the alarm with the ever-present fi re-truck siren (often referred to as the “VCU Fight Song”). In an urban campus environ-
ment such as VCU, emergency vehicle sirens of all kinds are heard often. If they sound exactly the same, how will VCU students be able to tell the difference?

This program is not only costly to students’ safety, but fi nancially costly as well. VCU has spent more than $90,000 on this alarm system. With the same amount of money, the university could pay for 11 in-state undergraduate students’ tuition for a year.

VCU can’t guarantee our safety, and in reality no one can. Richmond is an urban environment, and sooner or later, an event involving weapons is bound to happen. To claim and give off the illusion of safety serves no purpose than to mask the real problems at hand. VCU needs to be more honest about safety issues on campus, change what the siren sounds like and undertake a larger informational campaign.
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Correction: The Student Government Association is only responsible for the appropriation of a portion of the $624,400 budget listed in ‘SGA reports mid-year progress’ published Thursday, Jan. 17, 2008 in Vol. 47 No. 31 of The Commonwealth Times.