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news
Evacuating campus
safely a top priority
By Ben Dimapindan
On-line Forty-Niner
In light of Tuesday's
terrorist attacks on the East Coast and the bomb scare at
Cal State Long Beach, the efficiency of campus-wide evacuation
procedures has become the primary focal point of university
safety issues.
As thousands of
people fled from the Brotman Hall area because of a potential
bomb threat Tuesday, the traffic of the evacuation stranded
many students in their motionless cars at every parking lot
for a long time, including the parking structure, which accommodates
nearly 3,000 cars. Students waited patiently while the University
Police and the bomb squad investigated the nearby suspicious
vehicle.
"I was in
the parking structure, on the fourth level, for about an hour
and a half," sophomore engineering major Alex Tiu said.
"I didn't think anything was really going to happen.
I was sure they had everything under control. They did the
best they can to get everyone out. I got out sooner than I
thought."
Under the circumstances
of the bomb threat, university officials kept the safety of
CSULB students as the top priority while taking the necessary
precautionary steps.
"Ideally,
it went the way it went," University Police Capt. Stan
Skipworth said. "We responded immediately and determined
the best course of action was to summon the arson and bomb
squad, who is better equipped to handle this situation. Their
procedure is almost always conducted simultaneously to an
evacuation. We don't want to take a chance, so we isolated
the car and evacuated the perimeter."
Also, considering
that so many students were leaving campus concurrently, the
flow of traffic was controlled as effectively as possible,
according to Assistant Vice President of Public Affairs Toni
Beron.
"You have
to do the arithmetic," Beron said. "Twenty thousand
people are leaving the same place at the same time. It's like
trying to leave a rock concert. It's not from lack of planning,
it just takes a lot of time for people to get to their cars
and get ready to go. Everybody just has to wait their turn."
However, in case
of an immediate emergency, such as a fire or earthquake, the
university's evacuation procedure would require students to
congregate into designated safe zones around the campus, Beron
said.
"Depending
on where you are, for example, the upper campus would evacuate
to the quad area, the area with all the trees where the Fine
Arts Building is on one side and the KLON station on the other
side," Beron said. "These places are where you would
be out of danger from a fire.
"Also, there
is a building marshal for every building, who checks room-by-room
and makes sure everybody has left," Beron said. "Afterward,
they stand by the entrance and make sure no one can go back
in until it is all clear. Every building should have an escape
route [posted somewhere] too."
In addition, the
university has an agreement with the city of Long Beach to
use the campus and its facilities as an evacuation area for
the community in the event of an immediate emergency, Beron
said.
"The campus
is like a central point for the city," Beron said. "We
can provide access to hospitals and medical assistance in
case of a disaster. We have large expanses of space. For example,
with our fields, helicopters can land here. We have that room
capacity [policy] to hold people and have secure places where
things will not fall on you."
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