ON TUESDAY, March 18, at 9:45 in the morning, the University held a tornado drill as part of Tornado Awareness day. During the drill, two aspects of the University's new emergency response system were tested. The first was a text message alert system students can sign up for on the Virginia Web site, and the second was a general e-mail that goes out to all students. While the text messages worked, a glitch was discovered in the e-mail system, so most people probably weren't even aware there was a drill.
While it certainly is good to test systems and to prepare for the unexpected, I'm not sure how much this drill will help improve University safety in the unlikely event of a tornado.
According to the Virginia Department of Emergency preparedness, Charlottesville has in fact only had one tornado over the past 58 years. The number becomes slightly more intimidating when you add in Albemarle County's eight tornados, but I still feel that my odds of getting injured in a certain crosswalk on JPA are greater than my odds of getting injured in a tornado.
"I chose it because we don't have tornados here very often. But we do frequently have watches, and there's frequently enough potential for tornadic activity, and of course the things you never think will happen are the things that can happen, so you need to be prepared for those," Director of Emergency Preparedness Marjorie Sidebottom said. "It was also an opportunity to test the systems we've been working to make sure that they do exactly what we expect them to."
If you think back to elementary school, drills followed a pretty set pattern. First, you were told there would be a drill, then you were told what to do, and finally the drill was carried out. The University's drill, on the other hand, was more of a philosophical one where the point was to think about, in the case of a tornado, where would one go.
Now, sitting in my house, which is in fact part of the University's on-Grounds housing system, if I received an e-mail or text message telling me there was a tornado headed this way, I'm not actually sure where I'd go. Going with the generally accepted theory of getting as low down as possible and away from any window, the two best options I can come up with are either our oven downstairs or the closet that holds our washer and dryer. Both are great options, but I'm thinking it's going to get a little cramped trying to fit all 27 of us inside those two places.
The odds don't get much better no matter where I hypothetically put myself. Thinking over the various housing options I've lived in over my past four years on Grounds, I can't think of many great places to hide out. The fact is that we're simply not that prepared for tornados, and if we really wanted to be, we would not just need to send out a few text messages but, rather, fundamentally change the construction of the University.
But this wasn't the only point of the drill. This is, after-all, the emergency system that will be used for any emergency situation on Grounds. Testing the emergency systems is good, however, we didn't necessarily need a drill to go along with the testing. Simply testing out the e-mail system or sending out text messages to see how effective each of the systems work would have been fine.
In a Cavalier Daily article that appeared before the drill, ("Tornado drill tests alert system," March 18) Marge Thomas is quoted as saying, "Tornados are one of the biggest concerns on-Grounds at the University because they can come up pretty quickly." In a situation such as that, where we are actually pretty unprepared at a very basic level and unwilling to make the changes needed to alter that situation, you have to ask, are a couple of text messages or e-mail's really going to be the difference between life and death?
Margaret Sessa-Hawkins's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at msessahawkins@cavalierdaily.com.
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