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Audio emergency alert system to become more efficient

Soon, classes will no longer be interrupted by the long and repetitive “may I have your attention, please” messages during audio emergency alerts.

“The audio alerts are changing to make the messages more concise, clear and efficient,” Student Body President Tricia Anklan said. “Emergency alerts are now relayed much faster than they were with the previous version of the messages. Bradley is currently in the process of changing the audio alerts in all buildings equipped with the system. Geisert was the first building completed.”

Safety supervisor Rollin Arnett said the alerts will not be changing that much overall.

“The message content will not be changing,” he said. “We’ll just be shortening the message in general. Instead of hearing a tone twice and two ‘may I have your attention please’ messages before the emergency message, you’ll now hear one tone and the “may I have your attention please” will be taken out completely.”

Arnett said the tones and “may I have your attention please” messages were redundant.

“Originally the idea with the ‘may I have your attention please’ was so people had the time to prepare to listen to the message, but I think the tones do the exact same thing,” he said. “It would take awhile to hear the real message when it was like that. This way, the message is relayed quicker and it’s much easier to understand what’s going on.”

The idea was originally brought up through Student Senate, Arnett said.

“Student Senate requested the change, and we’ve been working with them to implement it,” he said. “This change was a great idea, and I agree that it needed to be done. I think this new way is much better than the old way, and I like it a lot.”

Although the alarm has been changed in Geisert, it will be another two weeks until the rest of campus buildings have the shorter alert, Arnett said.

“We’re in the process of changing the alarms,” he said. “It sounds easy, but it’s really not. We have to take the time to reprogram the entire system in every building. It’s incredibly time consuming, but it will be in every campus building with the audio alerts in two weeks. It just takes awhile.”

Though the messages will be changed slightly, Arnett said students probably won’t notice the difference.

“Nobody’s really going to notice the messages are different unless they’re really listening for it,” he said. “Content will still be the same, after all, [the messages will] just be a lot quicker and more efficient.”

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