An emergency alert e-mail takes almost 20 minutes to reach the thousands of UW-Madison students and faculty. A text message could shorten that to a few.
Factor in police investigation and the decision-making process to employ a mass alert, and it could be nearing a half hour before students know about a gunshot or toxic gas leak, according to University of Wisconsin Police Chief Susan Riseling.
When UW-Madison's mass text messaging system launches in upcoming months, it will add the quickest layer to the emergency response plan, but university police say any alerting tool will be far from instant.
Even in the unbelievable magic world of high technology, from the point of a gun fire '¦ it's going to be at least 20 to 30 to 40 minutes to get a message out, realistically,"" Riseling said.
The new text alerts could be the fastest way to reach the nearly 60,000 people in the university community.
The free, opt-in text service will act as one prong of the entire emergency response plan, called WiscAlerts, which includes e-mail, voicemail and Dane County's Reverse 911 program that calls area landlines in an emergency.
UW-Madison students, faculty, staff and possibly outside employers near campus will be able to submit their cell phone numbers in a confidential module at MyUW once the service debuts.
Why use text messaging?
John Lucas, a university spokesperson and member of a team to implement emergency response systems, said a mass text message system is unique because it can quickly reach mobile students.
""The service is so timely so we can get a message out, with pretty much confidence in a matter of minutes,"" Lucas said. ""If you happen to be in class or on the bus '¦ hopefully you'll get the text.""
The idea behind the system is UW-Madison pays a third-party company, Inspiron Logistics, to grant access to send messages to a mass amount of cell phones.
This cannot be done directly by the university because cell phone carriers read mass messages as spam and block them. With Inspiron, the emergency message should be allowed to travel through the carriers quickly, according to Lucas.
Inspiron will hopefully cut down on delivery delays - like the ones caused during the recent Northern Illinois University shooting and the Minneapolis bridge collapse - because the system's mass messages should be granted first access.
Brian Rust, communications manager for UW-Madison's Division of Information Technology, said the system will have to be tested once enough people are signed up. A test run will show if area cell phone towers can truly handle a message being sent to thousands at one time.
""There are issues of capacity because you have a very concentrated population and only so many cell towers,"" Rust said, adding that because those thousands of messages have to work through the queue, it could take longer for delivery.
How many will opt-in?
Even if the technology pulls through, it is still unknown whether UW-Madison students and faculty will sign up for the service. Hundreds of universities use opt-in text services, and for many big schools, registration has been an issue.
The University of Minnesota has been using an Inspiron service called TXT-U since November. The Twin Cities campus has a little over 50,000 students and about 13,000 people are signed up, according to university spokesperson Dan Wolter.
""We're relatively pleased with the number of people signed up at this point, but would always like to see more,"" Wolter said via e-mail.
Beth Novak, a U of M senior, said she received one e-mail about enrolling in the system when it first came out, but registering has since slipped her mind.
""It really hasn't been widely publicized, so I don't even know how to sign up.""
Novak said she was with a friend when the TXT-U system was recently used. ""My friend got this text message that said a robbery had happened in a parking garage. We all laughed, thinking okay, now we know about that.""
'High Level of Emergency' only
Lucas said UW's text system may notify about a severe crime incident, but would probably be reserved for ""a high level of emergency,"" such as the suicidal gunman scare last September at UW Hospital or a gas leak in a lab.
Riseling said police would solidify the presence of an emergency before they jump to employing the system.
""It's really important for us to verify that we have a true emergency,"" she said. ""If we just put it out the minute we hear a report, 'there's a man with a gun,' or 'I think I've heard gunfire,' we would have had countless alerts already.
