On Tuesday, February 25th, students at the College of the Sequoias (COS) received an evacuation notice for the Visalia campus via text and email. However, not everyone received the message. Fortunately, enough people were alerted, and within two minutes of the alert being sent out, students and faculty began to evacuate slowly, with Campus Police there to guide those who were confused by the situation. This led to everyone at COS trying to leave the campus simultaneously, causing heavy traffic in the parking lots, with some students stuck for nearly 40 minutes before they could leave. A plane from the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office circled COS for a little over an hour before Campus Police finally gave the all-clear and confirmed that there was no danger on campus.

Marc Royster, a physics teacher on campus, recalled his experience during the evacuation. It was during a physics lab that several of Royster’s students received the alert, which led to the class joining the masses outside and leaving the campus. While some of his students were stuck in the various parking lots for 20-40 minutes, Royster happened to ride his bike to campus and was lucky enough to avoid the traffic.

The reason why so many students didn’t receive the evacuation notice has yet to be confirmed, although the Campus Journal may have found the reason. At some point, BannerWeb was updated to include a new tab under the “Personal Information” selection. After clicking on Personal Information, there is a new tab at the top titled “Update Emergency Alert Options”. This new tab doesn’t transfer information already submitted on BannerWeb, so while students may have already attached a phone number and email address to their BannerWeb account, the Emergency Alert tab will need to have that information manually inputted by a user. If you didn’t receive an alert on February 25th, please follow the instructions above and submit a phone number and/or email address to be notified of any emergency at COS.