What University of Alaska Anchorage learned from a M7.1 earthquake

Abstract

Teaching university students and employees how to react during a damaging earthquake can save lives and prevent injuries. Most earthquakes are over in less than a minute, but the real work of emergency managers begins once everyone climbs out from under their safe place and checks for damage to bodies, buildings and infrastructure. Business recovery and academic continuity can take years. Supplementing uniformed responders with trained employee volunteers can make a huge difference toward recovering quickly. Universities are generally not charged with the role of providing public safety in the same way that government is, so they must train and exercise regularly to get faculty, staff, administrators and even some students to transition quickly during crisis to new responsibilities within an incident command system (ICS) command post or emergency operations centre. During an area-wide emergency like an earthquake, a university campus must be able to run a significant part of its response and recovery efforts on its own, as governments and other institutions around them around will be doing the same — and competing for similar resources. This paper will discuss the advantages and outcomes of providing emergency response training to civilian employees and students, empowering them to become first responders, recovery workers and incident managers to supplement the few professionals paid to fulfil those roles on a full-time basis.