As Tufts students and staff dealt with the campus' power outage on Friday, the university's Emergency Alert System had a largely successful run. Despite first-hand accounts of students not receiving alerts, the system reported a 98 percent success rate.
Five alerts were sent throughout the day on Friday and Saturday via text message and e-mail, according to Dawn Irish, director of communications and organizational effectiveness for University Information Technology (UIT).
University Relations sent 140,000 text and e-mail alerts in total during the blackout, reaching faculty, staff and students on the Medford/Somerville campus, Irish said.
he system improved its efficiency throughout the day. The first alert sent out 9,619 SMS messages in the first five minutes. The subsequent four alerts sent out roughly the same number of messages in only three minutes.
The success rate of those messages sits at about 97 to 98 percent with only a 2 percent failure rate. Irish attributed most of the failures to technical difficulties involving some students' cell phone carriers and phone numbers that were designated as cell phones when they were actually landlines.
Irish believes that students who did not receive the alerts most likely failed to correctly enter their contact information into the system.
"If [students] put their cell phone number into the system but don't specify if the number is a landline or cell phone, Send Word Now will not try to send an alert to it," she said. "That was the most likely reason they didn't get the alerts."
Students looking to make sure that they receive emergency alerts in the future can contact the UIT support center or e-mail UITSC@tufts.edu and request a Send Word Now invitation, at which point they can enter or update their information.
