Incident Support Team Plans, Drills for Campus Emergencies

Officials across the University have been carefully formulating a detailed Crisis Management Plan (CMP) since before Sept. 11 that they say ensures Harvard’s ability to react to any emergency.

But a year and a half later, only a select few are aware of the details of the plan.

And officials say overcoming obstacles created by the University’s compartmentalized administration and concerns over how much of the plan should be publicized has made its creation both a complex and low-profile project.

“Our role is to make sure the University continues to function, to make sure those that live, work and study here are protected,” says Thomas E. Vautin, associate vice president of Facilities and Environmental Services.

Vautin is the leader of the Incident Support Team (IST), a body created by the CMP to handle multi-school emergencies.

Vautin says keeping Harvard on its feet in an emergency “is no different than what we do every day to keep it running.”

Because the University remains free from specific threats, Vautin says, the current role of emergency management is about “being seamless and barely visible.”

“We don’t want to turn Harvard into a locked-down fortress,” he says.

These concerns—publicity versus panic, centralization versus independence and security versus freedom—characterize the balancing act that CMP creators have been performing for the past 18 months.

Show and Tell?

University officials say they have systems in place to communicate important emergency updates to students, faculty and staff—but the question of how much information to publicize, for security and comfort reasons, remains largely unanswered.

Members of the IST say they wonder how much information is beneficial to share.

“It’s very difficult to make a simple, straightforward mechanism for raising awareness without creating...craziness,” Vautin says.

Such a dilemma arose when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security raised the terror alert level from yellow, or “elevated,” to orange, or “high,” last month.

University Spokesperson Joe Wrinn says Harvard did not post an emergency update on the University website the same day because Harvard could not assume that the alert had the same effect on college campuses as on businesses.

“We’re careful to keep this page to what affects Harvard only,” Wrinn says. “It’s not a news source for everything terror related. If it’s Harvard-specific, it’ll be on.”

He says that the University is balancing conflicting interests as best it can.

“The problem is that we want to maintain an open academic environment,” Wrinn says. “We need to have as much vigilance without turning it into something where terrorists win. We can’t go about daily life worried all the time.”

Harvard Business School Associate Professor Michael Watkins, an expert in emergency response, says that Harvard risks unnecessarily alarming people by sharing information about emergency planning.

“I can come up with the scariest things channeling my inner Stephen King,” Watkins says. “But I’m not sure it’s productive to have people imagine [that].”

But Watkins says there are legitimate security concerns to be factored into the University’s calculus.

“We don’t want public access to details of our plans to people who want to use the details against us,” Watkins says.

But he says a certain level of information should be shared with students because “knowledge does help reassure people.”

Vautin says it is “worrisome” when the community becomes extremely nervous.

“Hypervigilance is very destructive. It blows things out of proportion,” he says. “There’s a sense [in] not responding, that an institution is slow, when there is a great deal being worked on,” Vautin says.

Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) Chief Francis D. “Bud” Riley says that conveying extraneous information can also be harmful to the whole concept of an emergency management plan.

“You have to be careful that the information you are giving out is not sensationalized and gets emotions up,” Riley says. “If you do that one or two times, you lose credibility with warnings and people don’t listen to you.”

But he says that in the case of an actual emergency there would be no hesitation in spreading the news to the community.

“I’m not saying to filter what we do,” Riley says. “If there is a specific threat, I guarantee people would know. But in the absence of specific information it’s counterproductive to put [warnings] out all the time.”

Bridging Gaps

In addition to communication with students, planners say coordination amongst all University bodies is key.

The University’s fractured administrative structure—with every school operating as its own fiefdom—provides a significant obstacle for the creation of a centralized emergency plan, planners say.

“The challenge is in the ability to communicate efficiently and rapidly,” Vautin says, noting that all the schools are equipped with their own emergency response systems for small-scale incidents and that communication between the schools only occurs during a more serious emergency.

But Vautin says that there are advantages to decentralization—if a plan takes it into account.

“One strength is the enormous collection of resources across the institution,” he says.

If these widespread local resources are coordinated properly in the aggregate, he says, then the University will continue to operate effectively in an emergency.

Vautin cites the House system as an example.

The ability of a House to respond to an incident is greater than that of the central administration, he says, because it can distribute information rapidly to its members due to its small size and localized nature.

Vautin says the impact of communication from the Central Administration in general is minimal.

“No one moves if the top says so,” Vautin says.

But a major incident like a utility failure or hurricane which affects the entire University, Vautin says, would necessitate “a need for greater support and also centralized guidance and coordination.”

He also says there is a public relations concern associated with emergency planning. For this reason, he says, it is essential for Harvard to present a unified message should a major emergency arise.

“The outside looks at Harvard as one. It doesn’t care about decentralization,” Vautin says. “When we don’t manage as one, it’s frustrating for [those] agencies.”

Staying Connected

Although the CMP cites HUPD as the first source of information during an emergency, the Harvard News Office has affirmed its status as the primary distributor of information on Harvard’s response to a crisis.

University spokesperson Joe Wrinn says communication—both internally to students and staff as well as externally to the media—is “everything” in the event of an emergency.

Vautin says communication on the local level is particularly crucial.

“It’s like a tree with branches. As the information moves out, there is potential for the chain to be broken,” Vautin says. “If the chain breaks down at the local level, not a lot can be done by higher officials.”

Riley says guaranteeing information’s passage from officials to the student level is difficult—making it is essential for students to take the initiative to seek out pertinent information.

“No matter how much information we put out, some students don’t receive it anyways,” Riley says.

In case of a gap in the information distribution, there are other systems to ensure that students are notified in the event of an emergency, he says.

“The College has communication networks that criss-cross to try to have a back-up, failsafe [system],” Riley says.

Emergency response for events like last month’s President’s Day snowstorm are largely mediated by individual schools and even individual professors according to their different needs.

Riley says the snowstorm, which dropped more than two feet of snow on the Boston area, did not call for the kind of uniform response measures outlined in the CMP.

“If there were a medical or public emergency, I would have no qualms about putting words out clearly and succinctly,” Riley says.

Ready, Set, Plan

Beyond discussing plans, IST members say detailed drills and exercises are going on behind the scenes to check for feasibility and keep the plan up-to-date.

Watkins says he helped to create a set of simulations to test preparedness for a range of different emergency scenarios Harvard might face—not only in internal response systems but in media relations as well.

One drill simulated a transformer explosion in which a Harvard Medical School dorm became “contaminated” with hazardous material, he says.

Harvard Business School conducted another exercise which created a scenario in which several students brought back an infectious disease to the University following a trip abroad, threatening an epidemic.

These drills made administrators walk through every applicable step of emergency response plans, and were followed by extensive debriefing.

More regularly, the IST meets to perform “table-top drills,” a face-to-face discussion between all parties of measures outlined in the plan.

But Vautin says sometimes it is impossible to prepare with any specificity for what might afflict Harvard.

“Some things you can preplan, but some things you realize as it’s unfolding,” Vautin says. “We have a flexible enough plan to respond on the fly.”

Director of University Health Services (UHS) and IST member David S. Rosenthal ’59 says the team took advantage of the President’s Day snowstorm to act out the CMP’s instructions, using a conference call system already in place.

All of the key players on emergency management teams carry a special conference call code number to get in touch in the event of an emergency regardless of their location, Wrinn says.

Rosenthal also says he has enhanced the emergency plans of UHS through communication with other schools.

“I had a meeting of nine Ivy league health service directors, plus MIT, the University of Chicago and Stanford,” Rosenthal says. “We discussed crisis management planning. Harvard and Stanford are ahead of the pack.”

Securing Students

The administration’s Student Health Coordinating Board is at the forefront of the student-focused side of crisis management. The board published a Crisis Management Manual in the fall of 2001 that provides a centralized framework to deal with an emergency.

The manual has been used a number of times—including during and after the tragedies of Sept. 11—says Assistant Provost Marsha H. Semuels, who works with the board.

“Our main job is to make sure students know these resources exist,” she says.

The guidelines apply not only to emergencies such as terrorist attacks, Semuels says, but also the death of a single student.

“Although the event may be different, the emotional impact of a terrorist event or a suicide is the same in the distress they cause in the student population,” she says.

In addition to emotional support, the University is implementing new safety measures—including extra officers stationed at gates and on patrols—to beef up security on campus.

Students might not be able to notice these safety precautions, but their strength lies in their inconspicuousness, Vautin says.

“They’re not seen because they are all in the background,” he says. “It’s just good management.”

The University hopes that students will give them reasonable feedback, Vautin says.

“Student interaction is very real and very important,” he says. “But adding more burden on everyone ultimately compounds anxiety.”

In spite of the trade-offs and debate involved in proper emergency management, administrators say they are working hard to improve this planning—even if it seems to proceed without student knowledge or input.

“There a lot of efforts to do what’s right, even though what’s right may be in the eye of the beholder,” Vautin says.

Riley says HUPD has confidence in Harvard.

“In my perspective, I think the College and University generally have their act together,” Riley says. “We don’t change levels based on what we read in newspapers, and we’re just as concerned about natural disasters as terrorist attacks.”

—Staff writer Hana R. Alberts can be reached at alberts@fas.harvard.edu.