Letter to the Editor: BruinAlert should be used more consistently during campus emergencies

The Daily Bruin recently included an editorial about the underutilization of the UCLA BruinAlert Mass Notification & Advisory System. We concur with opinions expressed and suggest if the system was deployed more consistently during campus emergencies, utilization would go up.

Alert and warning systems using text messages are becoming very popular. However, we and others doing research on these systems have found that messages need to be timely, consistent and concrete to be effective. In a study we are conducting at UCLA on the effects of emergency alerts using text messages, we have found that during emergencies students want to know, one, what happened, two, location of the incident, and, three, what to do next. More importantly, our results dispel two myths about emergency alert systems such as the BruinAlerts. People do not panic when they receive an emergency alert on their mobile phone despite the severity of the incident. And while UCLA is careful not to send too many alerts, many of our participants tell us that the excessive number of test BruinAlerts have desensitized them to any type of alert. Instead of sending these test alerts, UCLA should simply send alerts for serious emergencies and recipients will gain confidence in the system and use it to guide their actions.

EDITORIAL: BruinAlert should update UCLA community as situations progress

Eisenman is the director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters. Glik is a professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Martel is a project manager at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Peña is a graduate student at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and a former member of the UCLA Communications Board. Panameno is a research assistant at the UCLA Department of Psychology.