In less than 17 minutes, Bakersfield College, The Kern Community College District downtown headquarters, and the Delano Campus reported their buildings had safely been evacuated, according to Amber Chiang, public relations and marketing director for BC.
The scheduled great California ShakeOut took place at 10:18 a.m. on Oct. 18. Chiang thought the overall exercise “absolutely” was a success, and the evacuation time was “quicker than last year.” Practice exercises like the ShakeOut evacuation gives the college a chance to refine its emergency procedures.
“When it’s not a real emergency, it’s not a real situation,” said Chiang. “There’s not something going wrong. It’s practice so you can figure out what happened.”
The only real glitch Chaing felt was related to the drop, cover and hold for two minutes, saying that it was a communication challenge synchronizing the exact start of the exercise, and that “some folks mixed up the signal, and evacuated instead of dropping, covering and holding on.”
The alarms went on at 10:20 a.m. and they went off at 10:37. She said that is how long it took for every building to report in, adding that Agriculture took the longest simply because how far away it is.
Once everyone is evacuated and accounted, Chaing said each building must send a runner to physically go to the incident command center, a secretly located room in the library, and report all clear. “That took 17 minutes, and after that we shut the alarms off and let everybody go back to their buildings.”
Chiang said they also checked for gas and water leaks as well as made sure all the maintenance facilities and operations were functioning correctly.
“There are other things, as we constantly practice, we realize we need to do this specifically with our incident command system,” said Chiang. “We may need to do something a little bit differently. Add a new element to try and make things work better.”
Chiang said there would still be fire drills in different buildings, on different days, and at different times during the semester, so students can practice evacuations from the various buildings they might be in during the course of their education.
“It’s a needed thing and people get grumpy and grouchy,” said Chiang. “But we all realize the benefit of it when something happens, and students know how to get out of their building safely.”
Music major Richard McAuliffe thought it was disruptive and intruded on his instructional time. He was in an ear training class when the exercise began.
“We lost 30 minutes of class that we probably could have had,” said McAuliffe. “I got a message on my cell phone and my voice mail. It’s amazing how they notify us. They don’t need to send me a text, call me, leave a voice mail, and an email. I think an email is sufficient.
“It’s kind of annoying that we still have to do this in college,” said McAuliffe. “We’ve been doing this every year from kindergarten to high school, once a month and this is really ridiculous.”
Veterinary Technician Naomi Robinson thought it was a “pretty good practice drill.” She thinks it’s important for everyone to know what to do when an emergency situation comes.
“It was fun,” said Robinson. “I like leaving class, but I couldn’t get all my work done.”
She was glad they had the exercise.
Architecture student Karissa Garcia was in the cafeteria when the exercise commenced. She said someone told them to get out, and that a fire drill was in progress.
Garcia didn’t mind at first, thinking it would only be 10 minutes or less since it wasn’t real, “but it took almost 30 minutes.
“I think it’s a good thing to do,” said Garcia. “Because it really could happen, but because it [was] not real, I think it was too long.”