CSULB to be evacuated

By Ryan May
Daily Forty-Niner

Cal State Long Beach will be evacuated on Wednesday as part of a campus-wide drill.

The evacuation, performed once every semester, is part of an effort to prepare students and faculty for a threat or disaster, said Maryann Rozanski, director of Safety and Risk Management. The drill will begin at 10:15 a.m., and is scheduled to last for 15 minutes.

Scheduling a drill at a convenient time took a lot of preparation, Rozanski said. They made sure that the drill did not interfere with important dates, like the last day to add or drop a class, or on a day conflicting with labs.

"We work very hard on scheduling our drills," Rozanski said. "Unfortunately, with a campus of this size and complexity, we can never have a day or a time for a drill, even a five-minute one, that doesn't inconvenience someone."

There is no centralized way to set off every alarm on campus, so each of them will be activated by one of the 200 volunteer CSULB faculty or staff that will be stationed in each building.

Students and faculty will be directed from the building to another location at least100 feet away, she said. An evacuation has never been required for a real emergency, Rozanski said.

During the drill, it is not unusual for students to linger on sidewalks, or for professors to continue teaching class outdoors during the evacuation, Rozanski said.

"We recognize that even though some people may not be as cooperative as we would have liked them to be during the drill, we know that in a real emergency they will be," Rozanski said. "So if we get at least 95 percent of the campus very comfortable in evacuating, it becomes part of the culture. It becomes ingrained that this is how we behave. This is where our exits are. This is what we do."