By Timothy Kudo
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
UCLA will communicate important updates regarding the attacks on
Afghanistan to the campus community through various methods,
according to an e-mail sent by Chancellor Albert Carnesale
Monday.
E-mail, voicemail, a telephone hotline, the Internet and a radio
band will be used in conjunction with staff announcements to
deliver information. The Medical Center will also use special
communications protocols “by the nature of their roles and
service to UCLA and to the Greater Los Angeles community,”
the e-mail reads.
“We will continue to monitor and improve our campus-wide
communications procedures in the coming months, and we will keep
you apprised of new developments,” the e-mail additionally
reads.
The changes essentially improve the university’s
communication infrastructure that was already in place.
“It’s more coordinated now,” said Max
Benavidez, vice chancellor of university communications. “We
were just put on alert with the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 that
we need a way to communicate with our campus community rapidly and
quickly.”
The systems can be used for anything from an attack to an
earthquake or a hazardous materials spill. It would take an event
the magnitude of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the university
“used every imaginable communications tool,” to
necessitate alerting all students, faculty and staff, Benavidez
said.
Since Sunday’s attacks on terrorist camps in Afghanistan
and on the Taliban, the extremist Islamic group that controls most
of that country, U.S. security agencies have been on high
alert.
Many officials expect retaliation will come in the form of a
chemical or biological attack.
Since Sept. 11, the date of the terrorist attacks on the World
Trade Center and Pentagon, the Medical Center has prepared for such
attacks.
That day, Medical Center staff practiced drills and have been
coordinating a response to a counterattack with county officials,
according to Dr. Michael Karpf, director of the UCLA Medical
Center.
Additionally, the center has been doing drills in response to
biological and chemical attacks for some time, though infrequently
due to their high cost, Karpf said.
In 1999, the UCLA Medical Center was alerted to an anthrax case
that turned out to be false, he said.