Mad River Community Hospital, United Indian Health Services and Pacific Union school are currently on lockdown, following reports of a man with a gun at the hospital. APD officers, backed up by other area law enforcement, are on the scene.
A KHUM listener sent the station audio of the robocall that went out to Arcata residents earlier today:
This article appears in Summer of Fun 2010.
Thanks for posting the recording. My child attends preschool on the PU campus, yet we weren’t notified. I found out from a friend who had heard about the lockdown and knew my child attended there. I called the preschool and naturally they are on lockdown as well. This should be a wake up call about encompassing all programs within the campus on the automated, emergency messaging system.
My wife and I both received Robocalls while it was in progress. I received a call when the lockdown ended, too.
Laurel Tree across the freeway was on lockdown too.Thanks to aparents friend and the fast thinking TEACHERS at the schools. When your children are in school anywhere Columbine is always in the back of our minds.
What is a robocall? I am a parent of a couple students and didn’t know that my childrens school was in a possible danger zone until the teachers and parents of their started text and phone calling each other.Any child within 5 miles of a hot zone should be notified so they may make the decision of what THEY want for THEIR child. With high powered guns and such + a crazy person come on!
I suspect the ‘robocall’ is a prerecorded message delivered to the phone numbers of families who have students at the school. It’s likely a service paid for by the school, and so wouldn’t usable as a 5-mile radius alert system.
Because the preschool is not managed by the elementary school, preschool families would not be in the calling queue unless they were added by hand.
Keep in mind that this isn’t an instantaneous alert like, say, a tidal wave warning siren. The dialing program has to go through phone numbers sequentially and is limited by the number of phone lines hooked up to the machine, and, of course, the volume of phone numbers to be dialed.
What effects PU effects the preschool. They may be separately managed, but they share many other services. The service dial hundreds of numbers instantaneously without extra lines needed. It is a wonderful service used by lots of schools, I think there has been an oversight in including the preschool kids.
Yes, the oversight would be that the school provided the robocall company a list of only PU families.
To add preschool phone numbers takes a separate effort, and those numbers have to be managed as a second group. Why? PU might call PU families to remind them of school holidays and other important school events that don’t necessarily apply to preschool families.