University of Louisville Uses InformaCast to Alert Students – Video

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Brad Parkel

Watch this short video interview with Dennis Sullivan Assistant Director/Emergency Management at the University of Louisville talking about how InformaCast was used to send an emergency notification to staff and students, alerting them about an emergency situation on campus involving a firearm.

Dennis Sullivan: You know, 10 or 12 minutes after the incident began, we had a message to the community telling them what was going on and what they should do. We got a call to our mental health section of our Students Health Services, and instead of just helping a student get a ride to the hospital for treatment, it became a situation where a student allegedly had a gun trained on one of the counselors and was taking that person hostage. As soon as we were notified of the situation occurring, we sent a message out to the university community saying, “This building has a situation going on. Leave that building. Stay away from that building. We’ll tell you when everything’s clear and everything’s okay.” So, that morning when that hostage situation occurred, one of the dispatchers made the emergency notification in InformaCast and that went out to every dormitory, every office, every laboratory. Anywhere there’s a phone, they’re going to get an emergency message. When that system is done running, then we have the next system, and, hopefully, whatever percent we missed in the InformaCast, we get into text messaging, we get into our email system, we get into our Web page. But the first point that we fall back on has been the informaCast because we’re guaranteed results for those first 10,000 phones that we’re going to hit.

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