Evacuation drill

MHCC will hold a series of campus-wide evacuation drills on Oct. 9 to help keep students and staff prepared for any threat that would require them to leave all classrooms and offices.

There will be a drill at 2:20p.m. and another at 7 p.m. in the Main Academic Center, Industrial Technology, Visual Arts, Fisheries areas and most of the MHCC grounds. The Physical Education (gym) and Aquatics area will have one drill at 2:45 p.m. and a second at 7:15pm.

Formal evacuation drills have been held at Mt. Hood since 1993. Until then, students were “reluctant to evacuate” said Karen Reynolds, MHCC’s environmental health and safety manager. An alarm simply would sound, and students had no idea of what it meant, she said.

Instead, the current drills follow a system outlined in the Emergency and Safety Procedures Handbook, which is posted on the MHCC website. It can be found by scrolling to the very bottom of the home page, clicking “Intranet,” then on Environmental Health and Safety, leading to the Handbook.

The campus is now equipped with numerous alarms that operate by a “zone system,” according to the handbook. The guidelines say that when an alarm sounds in any location of a certain zone, it means that the whole zone needs to evacuate “because of the potential for a rapidly spreading fire or contamination.”

Earthquakes also can present a serious hazard.

In any such instance, students, employees and visitors should be on the move.

There are designated areas around the campus perimeter parking lots where students are asked to assemble in case of an alarm, the handbook notes.

Any students in class should stay with that group so that instructors can make sure all are present and accounted for. Disabled individuals are directed to have an “evacuation buddy” to assist them during the incident, the guidelines say.

Meantime, any motorists on campus are urged not to drive through the crowd of people evacuating. It is beneficial to keep congestion in parking lots to a minimum and to keep traffic flowing, so that first responders have a clear path to wherever they need to be, the guidelines say.

The drill continues until a Public Safety Officer or other uniformed official on site announces “All clear!” Then, all campus activities and courses resume their regular schedules.