Is USU emergency ready?

The last major earthquake experienced in Logan was in 1962, when a 5.9 magnitude quake shook several cities on the border of Idaho and Utah, causing damage but no fatalities.

According to the U.S Geological Survey, “The Cache Valley region in northern Utah and southern Idaho contains and is surrounded by several large, hazardous fault zones which pose a significant earthquake risk.”

The study performed by USGS identified spots along the fault lines in Logan that could be used to study potential earthquake hazards and aid the government in creating effective plans to protect the city from further earthquake damage.

Colter Davis, a geology professor at Utah State University, spoke to the dangers of earthquakes at the university.

“Earthquakes kind of have a mind of their own. They could happen tomorrow or in a hundred years,” Davis said.

In addition to earthquakes, USU could face many other emergencies.

The Emergency Management department at USU works to ensure that the student body and faculty are safe throughout every disaster, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I don’t think anybody was prepared for this pandemic; however, we’ve come through it pretty good in my opinion, which gives me a lot of faith that we would navigate a lot of the other disasters the same way,” Ellis Bruch, emergency management director at USU, said.

According to Bruch, the university is implementing a plan that will give faculty members on all campuses guidelines to follow in the event of emergencies such as earthquakes, fires, and active shooters.

“We call it an emergency response plan,” Bruch said. “Part of that plan is creating an emergency response team. These teams take on the lead of the department head or dean and then go out and train their employees.”

Each team is responsible to know about where all the assembly points and medical supplies are located on campus.

Bruch stated that upon completion there will be over 300 plans for the Logan campus that meet each department’s needs and that each team will follow.

These plans address everything from earthquakes to gas leaks and severe weather, which are a lot more likely to happen in Logan.

Other campuses are faced with different concerns. For example, USU Delta experienced severe flooding last year.

Students on all campuses will learn more about the emergency response plan in their scholastic orientation once it is fully updated in the near future.

In the meantime, USU continues to send text and email alerts to students as part of their current emergency response.

“If you get an alert on your phone or from your instructor, we want (students) to understand that our employees and our faculty members are trained up on these plans, so your best course of action is to follow their direction,” Bruch said.

He continued to say that the best course of action for students is to be educated and self-sufficient when it comes to emergencies.

“The best thing to do is to be individually prepared with basic food supplies to get you through a few days,” he said. “Those who have medical issues definitely need to make sure that they have a plan in place to deal with obtaining said medical resources that they need to survive.”

Students who want to learn about getting self-sufficient can visit the emergency preparedness website.

-Ryker Eggenberger@usu.edu

Featured photo by: Jared Craig