Virginia Tech officials disappointed at failure of emergency alert system

By Rex Bowman, Media General News Service
Published: November 14, 2008

Virginia Tech officials are upset with the California company that built the school’s emergency-alert system after it failed to send messages to the university community Thursday regarding reports of possible gunfire on campus.

The gunfire report turned out to be a false alarm, but had it been a real situation, the failure of the notification system potentially could have had tragic consequences.

“We’re disappointed and frankly not happy, and we expect to get some assurances that this won’t happen again,” Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said.

The VT Alerts system created by 3n Global, of Glendale, Calif., was supposed to send text messages and e-mails and make phone calls to about 30,000 students, teachers and administrators Thursday after campus police locked down a dormitory and searched the building for a possible gunman.

An initial message from the VT Alerts system went out, but two follow-up messages did not.

Yesterday, in response to questions, 3n CEO Cinta Putra issued a statement in which she said a problem with the company’s Oracle database slowed down the system and eventually created “access issues.”

Putra said 3n is working with Oracle to determine the cause of the database problem.

The company’s explanation did nothing to mollify Tech officials.

“We selected 3n because they’re robust and the best and capable of handling the kind of [message] volume you’d expect from a university of this size,” Hincker said. “If this is the best, then I worry about the other ones. We’re very disappointed.”

Tech pays 3n about $35,000 annually for the system, which was built after the April 16, 2007, massacre on campus, in which a student shot and killed 27 other students and five teachers before killing himself.

Thursday’s incident began around 12:50 p.m. when campus police received a report of sounds resembling gunfire at Pritchard Hall. Officers arrived, locked down the dormitory and began a room-by-room search.

At 1:40 p.m., the university sent out the first emergency message, using its online homepage, campuswide e-mails and electronic message boards in classrooms. Those systems, all under Tech’s control, worked.

Tech also deployed VT Alerts to send out 30,000 text messages, messages to nonuniversity e-mail accounts, and phone messages.

As far as the university has been able to determine, all of those VT Alerts messages were received, Hincker said. However, he said, two more rounds of VT Alerts messages never made it to recipients.

“You’d think they’d have a backup for this kind of thing,” Hincker said.

The gunfire noises turned out to be the sound of an exploding nail-gun cartridge outside Pritchard. Campus police believe two unknown men caused the explosion possibly by slamming the lid of a trash bin on the cartridge.

Rex Bowman is a staff writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.