UCF’s preparations for potential emergency situations include regular tests of the communication tools that provide critical information to the UCF community.
Several of those UCF Alert communication tools will be tested Thursday, Sept. 20.
In preparation for Thursday’s Alert testing, students and faculty and staff members are encouraged to log into myUCF and review their UCF Alert settings to ensure that contact information (email, cell phone number, and mobile provider) is correct.
The emergency communication functions that will be tested Thursday include:
Outdoor sirens, which emit a tone followed by voice instructions, will be tested at noon.
The UCF website, www.ucf.edu, will be tested from 1 to 2 p.m. For most of the testing time, the UCF home page will remain active and fully functional with an alert bar at the top of the page. All messages on the alert bar will be marked as tests. A portion of the website test will involve replacing the regular home page with an entirely text-only home page that may be used during some emergencies. When that text-only page is active, users will not be able to access links typically found on the UCF home page. Although other UCF web pages will not be impacted by the test, users may want to bookmark those pages in advance.
A test emergency text and email will be sent around 1 p.m. All members of the UCF community whose UCF Alert contact information is updated and who have not opted out of receiving emergency messages should receive both.
Indoor sirens that emit tones followed by voice instructions will be briefly tested in more than 70 buildings starting at 3 p.m.
The UCF Alert testing also will include social media.
For more information on the UCF Alert emergency communication system, visit www.emergency.ucf.edu/ucfalert.html.