Evacuation drill scheduled to take place today at 10 a.m. on campus
Husain Sumra
Issue date: 11/10/09 Section: News
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"The evacuation drill is going to entail a series of evacuations of buildings on campus," said Sgt. John Laws of the University Police Department.
Pat Lopes Harris, director of media relations at SJSU, said evacuation drills are something the university will do often.
"It's a fairly routine thing," she said.
Laws said the goal is to practice evacuation drills in case of an emergency.
"The idea is to get our building emergency teams, university police, our facilities operations staff, faculty and everybody practice at large scale evacuation of buildings on campus," he said.
Harris said each building is assigned an evacuation point where people are supposed to meet and check in.
She said the evacuation points and check ins are intended to make sure everyone evacuates from the buildings.
Freshman business major Gladys Cabagbag said she has class during the evacuation, but that practicing an evacuation drill is important.
"I wouldn't want it to be chaotic if there was an emergency," she said.
Harris said she understood that the drill could be an inconvenience.
"We want to make sure everybody is prepared," she said. "We don't do this often, and we don't do this often during the work or school day."
Laws said there was a large coordination effort to avoid the interruption of classes.
Harris said faculty and staff were notified of the evacuation drill in advance.
Laws said the drill is a scheduled event.
"We don't want to have professors in the middle of giving a test or having invited an outside speaker and interrupt the speaker," he said.
Ester Suh, a senior liberal arts major, said the length of the drill would determine whether it affected students.
"It shouldn't take that long," she said.
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