Stanford safety officials satisfied with siren test despite glitch
Stanford emergency management officials says they are satisfied with siren tests conducted Friday on the university's newly installed outdoor warning system. Beginning at 10:30 a.m. and ending at 3 p.m., eight tests were run on a new system designed to warn the campus community of imminent danger.
Although the sirens worked as expected, the system's voice warning capacity will be tested again in October during the first of two annual tests.
"All the sirens activated exactly when we planned," said Keith Perry, manager of the Office of Emergency Management. "We got some great data about our coverage, which we will analyze and then confirm with our next tests in October. We will retest the voice in a limited scale after we confirm that it is functioning properly. We identified a problem with it on our first test, so we intentionally disabled that feature for the following tests. We will incorporate voice into the fall test in October, at which point we will take some additional sound readings."
The new outdoor sirens are part of a comprehensive emergency warning system called AlertSU, which was instituted by the university over the past year. AlertSU can be used to notify the community of an immediate life-safety situation, such as a fire, a chemical or biological spill or an armed or dangerous person. In addition to the outdoor emergency warning system, AlertSU allows Stanford to send emergency announcements via phone, e-mail and text message.
The outdoor emergency warning system consists of seven sirens distributed across the campus. The high-intensity sound created by the sirens can travel up to a half mile.
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