The Genesis Of An Emergency System

May 1, 2008 12:00 PM

Cleveland State University (CSU) is making a name for itself these days, not only as a quality educational institution, but as a national leader in campus safety and protection. The university has strengthened its life-safety program with an emergency voice communications system that could well be a model for campus-wide notification in today's world.

The CSU system enables the university to deliver real-time emergency messages to the campus community through its own secure communications network. The emergency communications system shares the same infrastructure — an advanced fiber-optic network — that drives the university's networked fire alarm system. It is a cost-effective approach that leverages existing life-safety investments and provides advantages over other types of notification solutions. The system offers the same code-driven reliability, emergency back-up capacity and survivability as CSU's fire alarm system.

In addition to making the CSU campus safer and more secure, the system is an important component of CSU's all-inclusive vision for life safety. Under the leadership of President Michael Schwartz, the university began implementing this comprehensive approach more than five years ago, long before a spate of college tragedies put campus safety under a national microscope. Cleveland State's broad-based strategy encompasses the full array of life-safety systems, from fire alarm, emergency communications and fire sprinkler to access control, intrusion and video. It also integrates pertinent policies, procedures and operations relating to safety and security.

“When it comes to maintaining a safe campus environment, there can be no amount of preparation that is too much preparation,” Schwartz says. “We have to be aware, alert and vigilant at all times, and armed with all the state-of-the-art tools available to us.”

Campus safety has emerged as a critical factor in recruiting students and faculty, retaining employees and marketing an institution. Parents want to send their children to a college that emphasizes campus safety and preparedness, and faculty and staff want to work in a secure environment.

“These are critical issues to parents and our own people,” says John J. Boyle, whose functional leadership responsibilities as CSU's vice president for business affairs and finance include the Department of Public Safety. “In competing as an urban university, we have to be able to show that Cleveland State is more than on top of the problem.”

With the emergency communications system and other related advances, safety has become a strong selling point for marketing the university, according to Brian J. Johnston, director of marketing and public affairs. “As an urban school, it goes without saying that parents are concerned about the level of security at CSU and the protection of their children.”

Campus fire alarm upgrade

CSU's location in downtown Cleveland presents a unique set of challenges for campus safety. A public university with 40 buildings spread over 85 acres, CSU serves more than 1,000 on-campus residential students and another 15,000 commuters. The university has nearly 1,600 full-time employees, including 572 faculty members. At any given point in time, this urban university is host to thousands of students and staff.

These dynamics were very much in consideration back in 2002 and 2003, when SimplexGrinnell, Boca Raton, Fla., a provider of life-safety systems for CSU since the late 1960s, met with university officials to map out a strategy to significantly upgrade the campus fire detection and alarm system. A previous report from a campus Emergency Response Committee had recommended the implementation of an effective emergency notification system to communicate directly with the campus population in the event of an emergency. Members of the Emergency Response Committee had studied the possibility of installing a public address system that would be tied to the public telephone system. But the cost was excessive, and the public address solution did not offer the needed reliability, survivability and control.

After evaluating the situation, CSU decided that installing a voice fire alarm system would be a logical course of action for the upgrade. The upgraded system would enhance fire alarm capabilities and serve an important complementary purpose — serving as the foundation for the university's emergency communications system. “We realized that even though voice fire systems were not required by code, the voice capability would be a simple add-on that would solve the emergency communications issue,” says Dale Simmons, who served as CSU's director of fire prevention and security at the time and is now working in a similar capacity at an engineering firm.

CSU moved ahead with the strategy, securing state funding to finance the multi-year project with SimplexGrinnell and integrating the overall concept into building renovation and construction plans that had already been set in motion.

The building program that was under way included major renovations to Fenn Tower, one of two student dorms, and the physical education building, as well as the construction (since completed) of a new recreation center and parking garage. From the beginning, the underpinning of the entire project has been the installation of underground fiber-optic cabling throughout the campus. This closed-loop, fiber network has provided the technological foundation to support the ongoing fire alarm upgrade, the emergency communications system and future life-safety system migrations and expansions.

From the standpoint of performance, the fiber network provides a number of important advantages over traditional copper wiring topologies, including bandwidth to drive multiple systems and functions from a single fiber-optic cable and better communications quality over longer distances. Fiber also eliminates potential problems related to ground faults and protects against lightning strikes and voltage interruptions.

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