michael@memra.COM (Michael Dillon) writes:

So as part of your New Year's Eve plans this year, all NOCs in buildings with elevators should make arrangements with their building superintendents for one of those keys that allows you to lock an elevator open at a specific floor.

I've done this before. Even have a 500ft spool of terminated telephone cable from Radio Shack just for running down hallways and shafts. However, its a really bad idea. The maintenance key on the elevator overrides the fireman(person)'s recall circuit, and cause problems if a real emergency happens in the building. Besides, don't you people have butt sets anyway? I'm a bit disappointed no one picked up the real lesson about using FAX as a means to distribute emergency notifications. The lack of receipt confirmation in the Topeka case. Most EOC's have multiple ways to reach the media from the emergency alert system (This is a test...), or dispatching a police cruiser to courier the message to the media. If you use a 'BlastFax' product to distribute your media alerts, you need to check the log to see which ones failed. You also need to follow up with key editors and station managers to make sure someone actually picked up the fax off the machine. If you can't make contact via one method, you try the next contact method. There are lots of different contact methods. Each of their advantages, and their drawbacks. HAM radio works better during the recovery phases than during the alert/warning phase. Even radio networks like STORMWATCH have activation problems for unexpected severe weather. Satellite phones have vulnerability in their earth-based switches. AP newswire and CNN do better on national/international events, but aren't so good for communicating with smaller interests. Even the military systems have had interesting failures. Most of us are aware of the vulnerabilities affecting pagers, cell phones, wirelines, etc. The goal is to have a mix of contact methods, in the hope they won't all be out of service at the same time. One key thing to remember about using less common communication methods is the difficulty of training your staff on a long-term basis. If you've never acted as an observer for a disaster or disaster drill, you won't believe how confused even trained people become trying to use some of these systems. Things which change how they are used when in 'backup' mode (e.g. phones on the PBX which switch to direct lines when the PBX fails) are very confusing because they 'work' but not how people are used to them working. KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid is the rule. Although folks keep referring to what they are doing on December 31, that really isn't a good enough reason to spend the time or effort on this. Some other disaster is just going to come along and do you in on some other date you weren't expecting. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation