University Text Alert System Questioned

Sep 30, 2008 2:15 PM

News of the fatal stabbing that left a University of Southern California (USC) student dead has sparked concern over the effectiveness of USC's emergency notification system, TrojansAlert.

The system came under scrutiny when some students who were signed up for the service said they did not receive text messages notifying them of the incident.

These new technical problems coincide with a September 2008 study by the Georgia Institute of Technology that found text-message alert systems are ineffective in large-scale emergency situations because cellular networks cannot handle high traffic volumes.

The study was published shortly after President George W. Bush signed into law a new measure requiring colleges to immediately notify their students of emergencies around campus.

Department of Public Safety Capt. David Carlisle told the Daily Trojan that the TrojansAlert system was successful in handling the emergency traffic loads on Sept. 18, the day of the stabbing.

"The text message was sent at approximately 5:50 a.m. and within a matter of two to three minutes, 18,000 text messages had been sent and more were still being sent," he says.

Several USC students have said they did not receive the alert and heard about the incident from other students.

DPS Chief Carey Drayton said the TrojansAlert system relies on students to keep others informed by relaying the information to one another.

"I am very happy to hear people call and say my friend got it and I didn't. It means that our system is working," Drayton says. "We rely upon the fact that everybody is not signed up for [TrojansAlert] so we [have] to have a word-of-mouth."

Drayton says that one of the reasons students who are signed up for the service might not receive the message is that cell phone providers often filter out mass text messages as spam.

"A lot of cell phone carriers have put into place filters to stop spam from coming through on text messages," Drayton says. "Some of them don't have the bugs worked out in the system and our messages don't get sent."

According to the Daily Trojan, Roam Secure Inc., the company that operates TrojansAlert, is working with cell phone carriers to ensure that messages are no longer filtered as spam.

Carlisle also noted that the reason why the TrojansAlert message alerting the community of the stabbing was not released until more than three hours after the incident occurred was due to security measures by DPS officials.

"We had the areas surrounding the stabbing blocked off and although letting the community know about the event was important, the victim's family needed to be informed first," Carlisle says. "This incident [occured] so early in the morning that it took time for senior officials to arrive on scene and draft a statement. The worst thing would have been to release inaccurate information."

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