The world has paused. We are all well aware. But who pressed the button?
College and universities all across the United States have had to make a full transition to online schooling for the remainder of the spring semester, due to the coronavirus outbreak. Because of the rapid spread of the disease, it has deemed large gatherings unsafe, which includes college campuses. Individually, every college and university has had to make a statement at some point on how they would carry out the rest of the semester.
When a university or any type of organization reaches a certain amount of staff members, employees, students, or customers, it becomes necessary to have an Emergency Operations Center, or for short, an EOC.
An EOC is a central hub where members of an organization put together tactics for preparing and reacting in emergency situations. Such situations can be both man-made and natural emergencies such as fires, tornadoes, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, floods, and yes, disease outbreaks.
In this photo to the left, an EOC is in action at Riverside Medical Center in Kankakee, Ill. due to the coronavirus outbreak.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, an EOC uses Incident Management Systems (IMS) to operate during an emergency situation. IMS is defined as “an internationally recognized model for responding to emergencies … a temporary, formal organization structure that is activated to support a response, adjusted to meet rapidly changing demands of that response, and is then disbanded at the end of the response.”
When IMS’s are put in place, their goal is to strategize and create a plan that is understood by all members of the EOC in case an emergency happens. Typically, members are assigned roles to fulfill so the team can react quickly, efficiently, and with purpose.
During emergency situations, lives can be at stake. Often, they very much are.
With IMS’s being regularly developed and communicated, it allows there to be an effective plan right in place should an event occur. Emergencies bring a large rise in stress and uncertainty, and EOC’s exist to give a direction of “what do we do next”.
In the situation with the COVID-19 outbreak, this required emergency responses from hundreds of college and universities all around the United States.
At the time, most colleges were near their spring breaks, with students anticipating a vacant campus. Once states began implementing stay-at-home orders, colleges were tasked with strategizing how students will transition out of their college dorms and apartments and finish out classes for the remainder of the semester while adhering to government orders.
In an interview conducted by Hannah Young with Jonathan Pickering, member of Olivet Nazarene University’s EOC team in Bourbonnais, Ill, he described their role in response to the outbreak.
“The EOC has responsibility to manage and coordinate all aspects of the University’s response to the emergency. The president and administration set policy, and the EOC is responsible for carrying it out. It is formed of a variety of individuals from across campus who are working closely together to identify and solve problems in a cross-functional way,” Pickering said.
In Olivet’s case, and probably like many others, the EOC advises and carries out the decisions made by the university.
Many colleges are reliant on the support from their EOC’s to give them direction. Probably now more than ever, they are crucial in getting through these times.
