Tufts' emergency preparedness was in the first week of May put to the test by the Massachusetts water crisis, and officials have indicated that reviews of the university's response have been positive.
A water main break in Weston on May 1 — coinciding with Spring Fling — disrupted water supplies to 38 communities in Massachusetts, including Tufts' Medford/Somerville and Boston campuses.
Senior Director of Public and Environmental Safety John King and Technical Services Manager Geoffrey Bartlett, both of whom are members of Tufts' emergency management group, said that the university received positive feedback about its response to the situation.
"For the most part, people were very complimentary, which made us very happy," Bartlett said. "It was nice to see all of the work that people have put into planning these systems come to a positive use."
Brandeis University's student paper The Justice published a May 4 editorial highlighting and praising the effectiveness of Tufts' response to the crisis.
Tufts officials were first notified about the water emergency at 1:07 p.m. by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's Health and Homeland Alert Network (HHAN) System division, according to Bartlett.
The first message from HHAN, which was then distributed via e-mail to the Tufts community, initially described the emergency as a major pipe leak and asked residents to temporarily abstain from drinking tap water.
"When an emergency like this is evolving, often it takes a little while to gain information to assess the problem," Bartlett said. "At that point, it wasn't really clear to us the exact scale of the problem."
After the initial notification from the state, Bartlett and King alerted members of the emergency management group to discuss the situation's short- and long-term implications.
According to King, because the emergency occurred during Spring Fling, it was easier to activate the response team, as many of the officials involved were on campus.
"We have a command center for Spring Fling that we staff at Tisch Library," King said. "It just so happened that we had a lot of our emergency planning people on campus at the time."
Members of the emergency management group and the crisis communication team then began to analyze the situation and chart a course of action.
"At that point, we began looking at what our response should be and tried to get a better sense of the severity of this particular break," King said.
The break was later assessed to be "pretty serious," according to King, and Massachusetts had by that time activated the State Emergency Operations Center, run by the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA), and began publishing updates on a website. Gov. Deval Patrick then declared the situation a state emergency and issued a boil water order.
The response team's main priority was to keep the Tufts community informed of the evolving situation and to keep students from drinking tap water. The team drew on its experience with previous power outages on the campus.
"Once we learned about the boil water order, we activated our own communications protocol that have been developed and refined since the emergency alert system was used for the first power outage in October 2008," Bartlett said.
Text messages were sent out at 5:22 p.m. through the Send Word Now emergency alert system, notifying students about the boil water order and directing them to the Tufts website, e-mail or hotline for more information.
King explained that while text messages were sent out, the crisis communication team chose to rely mostly on e-mail and the website to communicate information to students. He noted that the complex situation did not lend itself to communication via text message, which is by nature limited in its content.
Tufts also used new forms of technology, like Twitter.com, to reach out to the community, according to Bartlett. He added that the information was then "retweeted" by other users, helping to spread the information.
Boiled water was then distributed in the dining halls, Bartlett said.
University officials maintained consistent contact with state officials and MEMA to receive the latest information, and Bartlett praised their accessibility.
"I have to commend the state," Bartlett said. "They were very transparent in what was going on, offered a very consistent message in how it could be handled, and we planned accordingly."
Local officials also applauded the state's handling of the evolving situation.
Somerville Deputy Director of Communications Jaclyn Rossetti said the city communicated regularly with the state, adding that MEMA and the National Guard were ready to assist all affected communities.
"We received regular updates from the state, and when we found out it was directly affecting Somerville, the mayor received direct communication from [the] governor and officials to make sure we had the proper resources to respond," Rossetti told the Daily.
King and Bartlett both emphasized that despite the successful navigation of the situation, students should take the initiative to prepare themselves for future emergencies.
"We're going to go back and evaluate our actions and preparedness to improve for the future, but we ask everyone to do the same," King said.
