We Heard You!

Back in October, NOVA participated in The Great Shakeout Earthquake drill. After this drill, the Office of Emergency Management and Safety sent out a survey to faculty and staff to collect feedback from the drill. We want you to know that we heard you! We got some great feedback about how to improve the drill in future years. We received feedback that reminded us to re-evaluate the drill timeline considering the reduced number of individuals currently on campus. We learned about the areas on campus that may not have displayed, played or received the emergency notifications. We got helpful tips about information we that could assist our community members during the drill. And, best of all, we got some brand new ideas for how we could improve the drill experience!

We received a few surveys that talked about the increased number of online courses and how these classes were not sure if they were supposed to participate. The OEMS team wants to work to include those taking NOVA courses online in our preparedness drills as well as those on-campus or working from home. For the future, we will discuss the best way our online NOVA faculty, staff and students could be included in the drill to practice safety skills at home.

Your NOVA Office of Emergency Management and Safety team is dedicated not only to your safety while on campus, but to helping increase the safety of our community at home, too. We want to help encourage our NOVA community to be prepared for a disaster, whether they are on campus, working or learning from home this semester. Make sure you have a plan, build your kit and have a communication plan ready. You can learn more by visiting https://www.ready.gov/.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback about the earthquake drill! We appreciate your participation and your evaluation to help us improve for the future.