Opinion

Hamilton must be better prepared for emergencies

By Patrick English ’15

The campus culture towards emergencies needs to change. The Hamilton Emergency Response Team (HERT), Campus Safety, students and faculty all reacted poorly to the bomb and shooter threats on Monday.

April 13 will remain a unique day in Hamilton College’s history. We never thought this would happen to our school, not at Hamilton. However, as one alumnus said, “It seems that every school goes through something like this.” If this is true, we must learn from these situations. We must be better prepared for the next one.

Let me first say that I am grateful to Campus Safety, HERT, the area police and all those involved for their work in this situation. They work hard around the clock to ensure our safety and responded well in this situation. However, everybody always has room for improvement.

After the threat was called into Campus Safety at 9:40, HERT chose to deliberate first rather than reacting. The first email regarding the emergency did not appear until 10:40, an hour after the threat had started. The school evacuated the Kirner-Johnson Building through a fire alarm, leaving students and faculty outside and vulnerable to threats from bombs or shooters.

Campus Safety and police chose to search only KJ and evacuate the majority of the dark side to the Field House. However, they did not consider the idea that the threat could have been diversion. With the threat on KJ and no attention on the light side dorms, this person could have gotten exactly what they wanted. At the end of the day, police forces had only searched KJ, and did not consider other places with multiple people such as the Science Center, the Library or the Field House. Every building on campus should have been searched, because the threat could have come from anywhere.

More blame falls on students and faculty for not taking the situation seriously. After the shelter-in-place went in effect, students still played frisbee on the lawns. Once students realized they would be sheltered for a few hours, some ordered pizzas delivered to their dorms or wherever they were “stuck.” These two attitudes showed that students did not take the threat seriously. Students put themselves and others in danger. At the end of it, members of the community only spent about seven hours without food and water. The multitude of complaints about lack of food and water surprised me. The campus could probably prepare bunkers with supplies of food. But it should not need to. The nature of these threats is that they rarely last more than 12 hours and food and water should be the last things on people’s minds.

There was an overall lack of preparation. Our first-year orientation program devotes an entire night to fire safety and each dorm has at least one fire drill per semester. When it comes to emergency safety, however, we are woefully unprepared. A few tests of the emergency system are run each year to make sure it is ready, and HERT used this system well throughout the day. However, the terminology was unclear. Many members of the community, including myself, did not understand the procedures for shelter-in-place or a lockdown and the differences between these two terms. The school should implement drills for these situations and carry out at least one per semester. Now that we have been through one of these emergencies we must notice the real threat. If we come across something else in the future, we have no reason not to be ready.

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