Deputy University Secretary Martha Highsmith announced in an e-mail Tuesday that there will be a campuswide test of the Yale ALERT emergency notification system today.
At approximately 5 p.m. on Wednesday, members of the community will receive e-mails at their Yale accounts, as well as voice and text messages at the numbers they designated as their “emergency phone number” in the Student Information System, or SIS.
Highsmith said she hopes the test will help reveal deficiencies and incorrect information in the system. The first test of Yale ALERT, held in Silliman College on Nov. 2, saw a “very high” success rate in message delivery, but some of the numbers used to contact students were wrong, she said.
Highsmith said the Yale ALERT system would only be used in cases of emergency. Something that was serious, life-threatening and urgent — the explosion at the Yale Law School five years ago, for example — would warrant an emergency notification, Highsmith said.
“There’s not a specific rule book on this, but it would be a situation that really affected the life and safety of people on campus in a general way,” Highsmith said.
The Yale ALERT system is powered by California company NTI Group, which provides emergency notification services for K-12 schools, universities, local governments and state and federal agencies.
-By Bharat Ayyar
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