For officials, this is only a test
Mistaken alerts show apps require caution
Inside the conference room at Clark County Fire Station 18 on Thursday, Arlene Chapman signed into Alertsense.
Instead of alerting the masses, the Clark County Emergency Management public warning and resources coordinator scrolled through the application. She clicked “Demo.”
Editing the 90-character message, she wrote TEST in the predrafted text: CIVIL EMERGENCY MESSAGE IN THIS AREA UNTIL 10:24 A.M. PST.
“This is a test,” she said. “Always double-check.”
She and Deputy Fire Chief John Steinbeck test the alert system every week and were doing so Thursday morning, just days after Hawaii and Japan sent out false alerts that a ballistic missile had been launched and was on its way.
“They did the exact opposite; their information said specifically that it was not a test,” Steinbeck said. “So that’s kind of the worst possible scenario.”
When an alert is issued in Clark County, it comes from one of these agencies: Clark County Emergency Management, Henderson, Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, the National Weather Service, the state of Nevada or the Southern Nevada Health District, Steinbeck said.
The entities sometimes work together to push alerts to residents, but of the few predrafted alerts, none addresses a missile.
For special circumstances like that, Steinbeck said, he would craft his own message to avoid any mistakes.
“You have the ability to cause panic with this when it’s not used properly,” he said. “We have to make sure that we have the right information and it’s going to the right people.”
That’s the same reason the department decided not to issue an alert for the Oct. 1 mass shooting. There was just too little confirmed information, he said.
Using phones or mobile devices, members of the emergency management teams issue alerts using Alertsense, and they can broadcast the same alerts to TV or radio waves.
The alerts are mostly in regards to flooding, boil water notices or Amber Alerts.
There was once a false blizzard alert many years ago, Chapman said. It was quickly recanted.
Using the digital system, officials also can narrow the alert to a certain
EMERGENCY
NSHE’S investments has built up over the usual 2 percent yearly distribution that is paid out to its schools in monthly installments.
“In light of that fact, the board has made the decision to do this one-time distribution and spread it across all the institutions,” he said.
UNLV will get the biggest chunk: $7.5 million. The College of Southern Nevada and the University of Nevada, Reno, will receive $5 million each.
The last time NSHE used a significant portion from its investments was with the $41 million purchase of Workday, a new software system used to manage money and employees. The software went live on Oct. 1.
Burton said NSHE works with Cambridge Associates, a San Francisco-based investment manager, to help make its investment decisions.
NSHE pools cash from all institutions, instead of each school investing individually, which allows the system to be “a little more aggressive” with its investing philosophy.
The system has more than $800 million, which Burton said is a “significant” amount of money, yet the board doesn’t take “undue risks.”
“We don’t go out and buy hedge funds or any speculative stocks,” Burton said. “It’s all very conservative.”
He said a diversified mix of investments, including liquid money market accounts, municipal bonds and some stocks and equities, make up the earnings they receive.
Margo Martin, vice president of academic affairs at the College of Southern Nevada, said the school will use a big chunk of its distribution,
$3.8 million, to hire more faculty and additional academic advisers and counselors.
Martin said staff increases are necessary to handle the expected influx of students who have applied for the state’s new Promise scholarship program. More than 9,000 students applied to CSN for the last-dollar scholarship, which covers student fees after other aid sources, such as the federal Pell grant, have been exhausted.
“Once we know what the need is and determine how many students will be coming, that will let us know how many more sections of classes we need,” Martin said. “But we’re grateful we have resources that we didn’t have before to address some of those potential needs.”
Martin said the school is still unsure if it will expand the adjunct pool with the money or hire faculty via one-year appointments.
“We’ve got some work to do in the next couple of months to find out
how we want to deploy it,” Martin said. “Right now, we have a finite number of human resources. If this enrollment tick comes to fruition, we’ll need more human beings to teach classes for those incoming freshmen, particularly in the gateway courses.”
UNLV will use $1 million of its allocation for emergency phone upgrades and $2.9 million to renovate about 19,000 square feet of space on campus that was formerly leased to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Nevada State College will use more than $600,000 for faculty to support increased enrollment in gateway English and math courses. And NSC will spend $261,167 on new faculty positions to support deaf studies and criminal justice and to expand career services.
Contact Natalie Bruzda at nbruzda@reviewjournal.com or 702477-3897. Follow @Nataliebruzda on Twitter.