Emergency Resource

Web bulletin board connects families in an emergency

Try it out: Setting up a family emergency plan? Test Berkeley’s new People Locator system; your student can post a message at peoplelocator.berkeley.edu using a CalNet ID. You should be able to read it and respond. And don’t worry: In an actual emergency, all test data will be erased before the system is activated.

Summer 2007 | With 32,000 students and thousands of employees, UC Berkeley is a mini-metropolis, with many of the needs of a small city. Critical to parents is the need for the campus to respond quickly and effectively in an emergency. A new tool, the UC Berkeley Emergency People Locator System, will put students, employees, families, and friends in touch with one another in the event of a significant earthquake or other catastrophe in the Bay Area.

The People Locator lets Berkeley students, faculty, and staff post messages about their location and well-being on a website that can be accessed by anyone. Parents and friends can search for information about their students by name or by e-mail address, and can respond to messages posted.

Hosted on a server at UCLA, the site should function even if Bay Area communications channels are incapacitated or overwhelmed.

Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, provided an object lesson, says Tom Klatt, manager of the campus’s Office of Emergency Preparedness, and new ideas came out of studying needs in that disaster. Before the People Locator launched, says

Klatt, “We didn’t have the infrastructure to know where all of our students might be — whether they were okay, whether they were available to return to school, or how they could be reached.”
Klatt expects the new online tool is capable of handling 30,000 or 40,000 hits an hour. “This is real-time self-service,” he says. “Before the People Locator, it would have taken us a week to process 60,000 calls.”