Sunday, May 10, 2009
Crisis Blog 3
After doing more research on the flood in Valley City, here are some of the things that I found. Email was the best way to get information out to the students and faculty when there was something important going on with the flood. I thought that Dr. Steven Shirley did an excellent job on letting the students know about the flood. The texts that they sent to students when the e-mail was down were very effective. They were ineffective though for the people who were not signed up to receive them. Next year they should make it mandatory that every student or faculty member should have to be signed up to receive the messages just in case something bad would happen again. The radio was the most accurate way of communication to the public rather than the TV. People on the radio were telling the public what the siren was going off for and on the TV they never really said anything what the siren was for. For the TV they only had updates and information on certain channels and most of the people usually do not watch those certain channels. Most of the people I talked to received more information on the internet using Facebook, Twitter, or the VCSU safety blog on the website. Since VCSU is a technology campus, most students use their computers to look up information rather than watch TV to get it. Another useful website for people was http://valleycity.govoffice.com/. This website also had up to date information that needed to get to people. The word of mouth also got information across to people. This might not have been the most effective way to get information across but it did work at times. When the e-mail wasn’t working and for the people who didn’t have the emergency texting with the college, these people said that they heard what was happening from other people who already new.
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I agree with you that VCSU's president did a great job keep the students and faculty up to date on what was going on. We definately utilized what we have to communicate to its best! I agree that the TV wasn't always the best place because it wasn't always current. It could be a couple hours behind of what was actually going on and in the case of the sewer breaking that wouldn't have been helpful at all. The radio was definately the best place for accurate, up to date information of what was going on. For students at VCSU having the email and texts was nice but I have heard that a lot of people relyed on Facebook to see what was going on. There was lots of photo albums and status updates at a place where a lot of students usually are at least a couple times a day anyways.
ReplyDeleteAs I have been reading other peoples blogs about VCSU, everyone has said that the president has done a great job. This is nothing less then what we would expect from the leader of VCSU. I believe that every leader, either it being the mayor of a city or a president of a college, they are all great spokes person for their community. I would like to see more about what happened during the flood that went wrong most everyone is focusing on how well it was handled but not so much on the bad of the crisis. I think this would be a great avenue to explore for the project. PEACE!
ReplyDeleteVCSU's did a great job using the email system I found out alot about classes and what they were going to do to fight the next flood attack. I never new they used twitter and have no desire to join twitter it sounds stupid, but still a way to figure whats going on at that time. I thought all students got an email adress no matter what that was interesting to learn also.
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