NMU Tests Its Emergency Alerts

If a large-scale emergency ever happened on the NMU campus, how long would it take to get safety information out to everyone?

The school was trying to find that out this morning.

It tested all the different ways it can notify people of emergencies.

That includes 10,000 e-mails sent all at once and a program that freezes all computers on campus to display a safety message.

The e-mail alert system was the one that worked a little slower than expected, but NMU communications director Cindy Paavola says that’s exactly why they tested all the methods at once.

She says there’s no way to know how to expect things to work otherwise.

School officials are going to look at how they run each system to see if there’s anything they can do on their end to speed things up.