When Marty Shaub started her career in Environmental Health and Safety at the University of Utah in 1988, the department was little known and underutilized.
Called the Department of Public Safety then, it reported to campus police. With emergency management on everyone’s minds now, the department’s role has risen in prominence from just overseeing worker safety and environment protection.
Shaub, the department’s director since ’93, has been overseeing a number of projects to prepare the U for an emergency. With the Winter Olympics coming, these efforts have shifted into warp speed.
“The Olympics has done a lot for us,” Shaub said. “Communities rarely get the benefit of a scheduled out-of course [not part of normal operation] event to prepare for.”
Existing emergency plans have been in place since the ’70s, according to Shaub, but the increased complexity within the U community has made much of it outdated. Its re-evaluation began three years ago and involved a number of U departments?campus police, plant operations, residence halls, etc.
In addition to the urgency, budget constraint is another challenge for Shaub, a U employee for 18 years. Cost consciousness has required “dual-use”?utilization for emergency and non-emergency purposes?for every resource she considers acquiring.
“We don’t have someone waiting for a building to collapse into rubble,” Shaub said.
Training is especially demanding because of the size of the U community. Shaub has been doing classroom-style training one department at a time across campus.
Shaub also meets regularly with a 25-member emergency team composed of various administrators and their assistants and “frontline workers,” such as campus architects and police officers who would provide important information to the central decision makers during a crisis.
In the University Services building, which is immediately west of the Huntsman Center, lies the command center where the emergency team would convene to handle a declared disaster.
The building is selected because it has a seismically stable structure, renovated communication lines and easy access to people inside and outside the U. The offices of many utility and maintenance personnel, who would be ready to contribute with short notice, are within the building as well.
During a crisis, a large conference room in the building would be converted into the emergency operations center. Phones, computers, fax machines, HAM radios, status boards and various maps depicting electrical, communication and gas lines would line the walls, helping the members quickly assess the situation.
One recent drill involved the handling of a major traffic accident, where the team had to quickly alleviate the congestion and the ensuing chaos. Shaub said the practice is like the scenario in the movie “Apollo 13,” where astronauts are stranded in a malfunctioning space capsule and needed help from the Houston command center to guide them safely back to Earth.
“Here’s the problem, get us the solution,” Shaub would say to the emergency team. “You have 40 minutes before this gets critical.”
The team hasn’t had to use the operations center for a real emergency yet. The U has three levels of emergencies, and it has reached level two on only a few occasions.
“We have managed it so it didn’t escalate” to a level three, Shaub said.
Shaub recalled an incident about one year ago when a pungent odor permeated the valley. Health officials never identified the actual source or the substance, Shaub said, but the U went to a level-two alert. Campus emergency coordinators responded when several buildings, including the Marriott Library and the Social and Behavioral Science tower, decided to evacuate.
The recent anthrax incidents have also added complexity to the emergency plans, which Shaub called a “living document.” The U has worked with the state Department of Health and the FBI to develop plans for handling reported suspicious items.
Another area spotlighted recently is communications. The U now shares a statewide frequency with all other emergency responders.
“We had to change our radio protocol,” Shaub said. “We had to be more professional.”
Shaub said current efforts now focus on monitoring information coming from the Department of Justice and other government agencies. She said Justice has not warned about any increased risk or specific targets in Salt Lake City.
Shaub’s department will also continue reviewing safety code in various buildings and making improvements to “maximize life safety,” such as installing a new fire sprinkler system in the Social and Behavioral Science tower and fire alarm is the Talmage Building.