AUBURN, Ala.—Among Christine Eick's key accomplishments as Auburn University's executive director, risk management and safety, has been helping establish a comprehensive emergency management program to prepare the university to deal with a crisis or disaster.

Prior to the program, emergency management “used to be a plan on a shelf and we weren't doing a lot of training on it,” Ms. Eick said. “It wasn't fully integrated into the university. Now, there are four people devoted to emergency management, whereas before someone in safety was picking it up as an extra duty.”

Given the size and complexity of the university, developing such a program involves numerous considerations. “If you don't break it down into manageable pieces, you can easily be overwhelmed,” Ms. Eick said. “So what we did was set priorities.”

It also was necessary to find the staff resources to take on the sizable undertaking.

“We needed some additional help in the area. And one of the things that I did, I saw that it was a high priority, so it was a case of taking people off other projects and saying we're committed as a department to get this up and going,” Ms. Eick said.

“Everything is important, which is kind of difficult in safety,” Ms. Eick said. “Everything is critical, but you've got to have priorities. So you've got to give yourself permission to set some things aside, or you'll never accomplish one big thing.”

Establishing the emergency management program involved reaching out to the various departments and offices on campus, as well as reaching outside of risk management and safety for the right people, as occurred in establishing a mass notification system.

“The perfect person to put in charge of that project was our telecommunications manager,” Ms. Eick said. “So telecommunications did the brunt of the work on that. We worked with them on that project, but they definitely had the lead on it.”

“So getting as far as we have come (with emergency management) couldn't have happened if we had to have absolute control over everything,” she said.

It also was necessary to set specific procedures and definitions related to handling various events.

“It became apparent that we needed to define a "campus closure' and "class cancellation,'” Ms. Eick said. “And who stays, if anybody stays.”

If classes are canceled, for example, students and faculty go home, while remaining university staff continues to work. In the event of a campus closure, it is necessary to determine whether employees such as food vendors would remain on the job to feed students.

A precise definition of what is meant by “essential employees” also had to be decided, particularly as some university workers were sensitive to being considered “unessential.” Decisions also were made on paying hourly employees in the event of a short-term campus closure.

“Those that do have to come in, we're going to pay them time and a half; and those who don't come in, who aren't salaried employees and we're not giving them the opportunity to work, we're going to pay them,” Ms. Eick said.

The university has sought to coordinate its emergency management efforts with local government programs. For example, the four levels of emergencies defined by the university match those of city and county emergency management plans. At each level, there are outlines of which employees are to report to work, based on input from university departments to help define the appropriate personnel.

The key, Ms. Eick said, is to make all those sorts of decisions in advance, so decisionmaking can focus on whether to close the university when an emergency occurs.

The emergency management effort also has involved considerable communication of emergency information to the university community by e-mail or cell, home or office phone. Risk management and safety captured information on all university-owned phones and has numbers for about 60% of the campus community's cell phones.

Among other things, the campaign to collect emergency contact information includes a pop-up window during online registration, asking students to provide their cell number. If students don't provide contact information, the system “doesn't block them from registering for classes, but it's kind of that nagging reminder,” Ms. Eick said.

And, in the event of severe weather, emergency management is prepared to send out e-mail weather briefings, including a map displaying information from weather-tracking software obtained by the risk management and safety department and a quick briefing from emergency management on what to do in that type of weather event.