Campus Safety Evacuation Drill Disrupts School Day
Campus Safety sent alerts at 3:26 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 11 to students and faculty via text messages and email directing them to drop their regular routines to partake in a mass evacuation drill.
Totalling 98.0 percent, the success rate lowered by 0.7 percent from last year, with some day students failing to report to Grainger and two residences—Bancroft Hall and Gould House—failing to report to the gym. In combination with a campus-wide lockdown from the presence of an escaped inmate on Oct. 10, some have questioned the safety measures in place at Exeter.
“I think [the evacuation procedure] is incredibly stupid; if there’s an actual emergency I’d take a Lyft to Boston,” upper Sam Park said. “The way that they’re having all the students first go back to the dorms, I understand it’s for organization purposes, but the first priority should be to get students off campus in a real emergency.”
Paul Gravel, Director of Campus Safety, said that there was no relationship between the lockdown and the evacuation drill. “The lockdown was planned in early September; Campus Safety works with the Dean of Students’ office to select the best date that would provide the minimal amount of disruption to the students and faculty,” he said. “This drill was in no way prompted by the lockdown.”
Exeter’s standard evacuation drill consists of two phases—Phase 1, where residential students report to their dorms and day students to Grainger, and Phase 2, where dorms report to either Love Gym or Thompson Gym. Students that were off campus within the 10 mile radius were told to email or text campus safety to report their locations.
The Phase 2 drill for boarders was implement in the 2017-2018 school year. “We do this so if evacuation was necessary, it would be done from the second location,” Gravel said. “It would be easier and more efficient to account for all those needing to be transported off campus and easier access for buses.”
An email was sent to dorm heads in September detailing the two phases with a list of where dorms had to report to. However, this information was not in the text messages that went out on the day of the evacuation. Gravel characterized the two dorms’ failure to report, therefore, as a “communications issue.”
Among those absent was the entirety of Bancroft Hall. Bancroft dorm head Aviva Halani explained that she forgot about the second phase of the drill. “After I took attendance in the dorm, I let students go. I was supposed to take them to the gym and do another round of attendance checks. But that was not in the text I received, and I forgot,” she said. “If one of the three texts I received had said to take the students to the gym, I would have done so.”
Upper Ramyanee Mukherjee, a resident of Bancroft, described the experience as “confusing.” After Bancroft’s residents had already begun to disperse, the proctors became concerned as they were informed by friends from other dormitories to report to the Gym. “They tried to get as many people from Bancroft to go to the gym, but a lot of girls were already in their rooms,” she said. “There were also a lot of contradictory emails sent to the dorm saying we should and shouldn’t go. Most people believed we didn’t have to go at all so they didn’t even think about it.”
Bancroft lower Mary Timmons agreed with Mukherjee. “We were under the impression that we didn’t need to go to the gym. Everyone was required to go to the common room so that they could be accounted for…the dorm fac thought that was all that needed to be done, so we were then free to go back to our rooms.”
Timmons thought Bancroft made the right choice to stay back. “At the time [of the evacuation drill] the dorm faculties were confused on what to do. I think that it was a good decision to stay back because we were confused. We might have done the wrong thing at the wrong time if we went.”
According to lower Morgan Lee who is also a resident of Bancroft hall, even after Bancroft learned that most of the other dorms showed up to the gym, there was no announcements made to the whole dorm in the days that followed the evacuation.
To avoid future confusion, Halani recommended that information about Phase 2 reporting locations be included in the text messages sent out to all dorms during the drill.
Meanwhile, the Dean of Students Office is following up with students who failed to report. Some, while complying with the procedures, found them to be ineffective in a real crisis scenario. “I think [the evacuation procedure] is incredibly stupid; if there’s an actual emergency I’d take a Lyft to Boston,” upper Sam Park said. “The way that they’re having all the students first go back to the dorms, I understand it’s for organization purposes, but the first priority should be to get students off campus in a real emergency.” They conceded that having students gather at the gym is effective, though Phase 1 of the process should be eliminated. “In an emergency, you want to have as few steps as possible,” Park said.
In a similar vein, senior Jinpyo Hong commented on the ineffectiveness of gathering students in the dorms. “I had some friends who were at club sports during the drill and they needed to go all the way back to their dorm and then come back to gym,” he said. “The Lion Card system shows that we don’t need to meet with the adviser and take attendance.”
Upper Brian Liu concurred. “Taking attendance with Lion Cards doesn’t really make that much sense either because I imagine in the event of a real catastrophe people would leave as fast as they could,” he said. Despite this, Liu is not sure what an alternative to the Lion Card system would be. “Perhaps the evacuation location could be near the center of the campus,” he said.
In Grainger, while day students gathered for attendance records, day student proctors discussed OMA’s Personhood flowchart, which outlines steps to respond to personhood attacks. The proctors received training from Dean of Multicultural Affairs Sami Atif about a week before the drill. Regarding the timing of the flowchart discussions, a day student, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “I thought it wasn’t exactly the right time. It was in the middle of an evacuation, and the content of the presentation wasn’t exactly relevant to the evacuation itself.”
Despite some challenges, Gravel emphasized the importance of these drills. “A month ago, Andover needed to prepare for evacuation with natural gas explosions rocked the Merrimack Valley. These drills are vital to insure we are prepared if the need to evacuate ever arises,” he said.