The Personal Safety Advisory Committee met with Vice President James Van Voorst at his request last week to review the events of Monday, April 16, relating to the weather and power outage.

“The health and safety of the campus community is fi rst and foremost our priority,” Van Voorst told the group as he reviewed the numerous consultations with weather experts, highway and road supervisors, county emergency offi cials, University police and Physical Facilities that had taken place. With no state of emergency and reports of clear roads from the county and road crews, the University remained open. “Were it not for the power outage later in the morning, we would not have canceled classes at all,” said Van Voorst.

The committee made a number of suggestions for improving communications during such events and discussed e-mails that it had received citing areas for improvement. Lessons were learned from the day’s events. With one system failure — the inability to broadcast a campus-wide voicemail message — that has now been corrected, Van Voorst said that the campus will test its procedures more frequently and investigate additional methods of communication. In addition, the campus emergency operations group will continue its review of on-campus emergency preparedness and response protocols and the PSAC will be consulted as the review continues.