Computerworld — In an emergency, is an e-mail message enough to notify people of what's happening so they can take shelter, evacuate or take other evasive action?

That's one of the questions being asked in the wake of Monday's shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech University, where 32 students and faculty members were killed in two separate shooting incidents more than two hours apart. The gunman apparently killed himself, bringing the death toll to 33.

Although the first shootings occurred just before 7:15 a.m., university officials didn't send out a campuswide e-mail about the incident to more than 26,000 students and faculty members until about 9:30 a.m., according to reports. In that first incident, two students were killed in a dormitory, but no specific information was included in the e-mail; students were simply told there had been a shooting and urged to be "cautious" and report anything suspicious.

At the time, many students were already on campus or en route and never received word that something was amiss. The school also did not lock down the campus after the first shootings.

Just 15 minutes after that 9:30 a.m. e-mail went out, police received a 911 call reporting additional shootings in an engineering building on the campus. It was there that the majority of deaths occurred. Thirty people were shot and killed before the assailant apparently turned the gun on himself.

While university officials and various law enforcement agencies are still unraveling exactly what happened, the use of the e-mail notification system and the time line related to when messages went out are expected to be part of the probe.

E-mail is not the only option available in such scenarios. Other technologies, such as emergency notification systems that can push out critical informational messages to cell phones, landline phones, e-mail addresses, fax machines and other devices, are being used at other schools and companies across the nation.

Casey Paquet, the Web manager at Eckerd College, a liberal arts school in St. Petersburg, Fla., said Eckerd deployed an emergency notification system from MessageOne a year ago to better protect students in case of hurricanes and other weather emergencies. The AlertFind system allows the school to send custom on-the-fly alerts instantly to its 2,200 students, faculty and staff members during any emergency, Paquet said.

"We're sitting on 180 acres of waterfront here, which is gorgeous to look at but which puts us in a prone position" in the event of destructive weather, he said. "We've been incredibly lucky, but over the last couple of years we've gotten a lot more aggressive" in increasing safety for students and faculty.

Continue Reading