Deltek Analyst Kristin Howe reports.
The University of Tennessee – Chattanooga is known for being a large metropolitan college with a beautiful campus. It is not generally known for its emergency preparedness, but it should be.
When most people think of campus safety and security, they think of the traditional blue-light alarm systems installed at colleges across the county, and of security officers walking students to and from buildings after dark. They don’t associate college emergency management with cutting-edge, state-of-the-art systems capable of preventing dangerous situations and instantaneously notifying students of safety concerns. The University of Tennessee – Chattanooga has taken emergency preparedness to a whole new level, and we’ve outlined several projects the university is working on to keep students safe.
One major initiative is modeled off the state of Alabama’s Virtual Alabama project, which is a program built off of Google Earth’s mapping and allows emergency personnel to view everything from statewide road networks, floodplains, to evacuation routes. The maps detail the layout of community buildings and include electrical wiring and plumbing system maps in prep for disaster readiness. The state has placed nearly 80,000 different map layers over the traditional Google Earth maps so that damage can be assessed immediately in the event of a disaster, and precautions can be taken to mitigate further damage.
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