Campus communities need to prepare for emergency situations and put effective measures in place before disaster strikes. In order to get a leg up on crises, the University of Southern California recently began its Community Emergency Preparedness Project, the Daily Trojan reported.
The program is designed to educate community members on methods for handling emergencies through family preparedness courses, Citizen Corps neighborhood group organizing and Community Emergency Response Training. The project is partially intended to build community response skills to supplement the college's roughly 300 trained crisis personnel.
Additionally, CEPP will help to improve areas near USC as a part of a continuous outreach program, said Gregory Papazian, a Price School of Public Policy graduate student.
"USC has a great tradition of community service, and offering this training in a bilingual format highlights the fact that USC cares deeply about safety on campus and in our surrounding neighborhood," Papazian said.
Erroll Southers, associate director for research transition at the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, and William Regensburger, USC's director of fire safety and emergency planning, sought out members of the local community, campus staff and student organizations, encouraging them to participate in the program.
Disaster preparedness training programs can be effective in conjunction with the implementation of an emergency communication system from Omnilert. It empowers organizations to keep key groups or the entire community informed via multiple communication platforms in the event that some platforms are knocked out from the emergency.
