Today marks the second anniversary of the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, which claimed 32 lives and wounded many more. Since that time, UCSC has taken great strides to improve safety and security on our campus and our ability to respond to both man-made and natural emergencies.
At the beginning of the Fall 2008 Quarter, UCSC implemented the CruzAlert emergency notification system, which allows critical information to be rapidly distributed via telephone, cell phone, text messaging and e-mail in the event of a major campus emergency. CruzAlert messages are intended to provide information on actions that need to be taken immediately by students, faculty and staff to protect themselves during such events.
If you have not already done so, I strongly encourage you to register your cell phone, home phone and other phone numbers or e-mail addresses with CruzAlert so that you can receive these important messages. Other than periodic system testing, we will not use this information for any purposes other than to communicate with you during campus emergencies. You can sign-up by going to http://cruzalert.ucsc.edu and following the instructions for either students or faculty/staff.
On Friday, May 1, 2009, the campus will conduct a test of both the e-mail and the text messaging capabilities of CruzAlert. During these tests, e-mails will be sent via CruzAlert to all campus e-mail addresses and text messages will be sent to all registered cell phone numbers. Due to the vendor system used to send CruzAlert messages, the e-mails will show as coming from various numeric e-mail addresses in the @notify2.mir3.com domain and the text messages will show as coming from a 5-digit number. If you are concerned about the validity of these messages, contact the ITS Help Desk at 9-4357.
If you do plan to register or change your cell phone number in advance of this test, please do so no later than Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 5:00pm. We cannot guarantee that changes made after this time will be properly uploaded before the test occurs. Also, if you do receive a text message on your cell phone, please reply to the message with the number "1" only in the message body to verify receipt. Due to the way text messaging works, we are unable to verify message delivery beyond transmission to the cell phone carrier without your response, so this is critical in testing the effectiveness of the system. If for some reason you do not receive a message and do have a text-enabled cell phone registered, please e-mail alert@ucsc.edu with your name and your cell phone number so that we take the necessary follow-up actions.
