By Grant Terwilliger
September was National emergency preparedness month and campus fire safety month, the Office of Emergency preparedness and health center on campus collaborated to educate students on the importance of being prepared and helping others during emergencies.
Michael Caraballo has been the emergency management director at SUNY Plattsburgh for over 10 years and has worked closely with the health center and other partners on campus to give students insight into different emergency scenarios.
“We have a committee and we look at our agency partners and the people that usually either respond to emergencies, help us with emergencies or people we go to for resources. So we reached out to our agency partners and asked them to be a part of the event,” Caraballo said. “We looked at some of those agencies to see what things they could provide us to kind of give participants either hands-on experiences or eye-opening experiences.”
Volunteer firefighter and junior at SUNY Plattsburgh Michael Watson said that he believes that having guidelines and experience with emergency scenarios allows students to better be equipped to act responsibly during an emergency.
“An emergency can quickly become a mass casualty incident if we’re not prepared, and in an environment where you are rural it’s important to realize that we need to have guidelines and practices in place to respond to emergencies,” Watson said.
Events like emergency preparedness day help spread awareness about being prepared during a crisis in an interactive and engaging way.
Marco Ayala-Perez has been the student health and counseling center administrator since the COVID pandemic. Ayala-Perez became involved with the Emergency Preparedness committee two years ago, and realized that health goes hand in hand with emergency preparedness.
“It was kind of the realization that Narcan training is not just a health initiative, but it’s also an Emergency Response initiative. So that’s why this semester we partnered with the Office of Emergency Management to make it part of emergency preparedness day,” Ayala Perez said.
The health center on campus has narcan, silas testing strips, fentanyl testing strips and xylazine testing strips with pamphlets and information on how to use them. You can also get training through the health offices on campus. The health center has a no questions asked policy, as it wants students to be able to have those resources and be able to use them.
Ayala-Perez also worked with the nursing students and Greek life on campus to canvas the local neighborhoods where off-campus student housing is located. They handed out packets of information on fire safety and prevention. Ayala-Perez and the volunteers encouraged students to attend safety training on emergency preparedness day.
Watson expressed his viewpoint of emergency preparedness day and the training that goes on throughout the month and even the year. According to Watson, involvement with these events on campus is important to student safety and needs to include more student involvement.
“Having a student share their experience or maybe something that they’ve seen and building on that may draw more people,” Watson said. “I think you definitely need to have more student involvement and student input into what we can do to train together, because that’s essentially what you’re doing, you’re training people.”
According to Caraballo, being prepared for events is important for all students and students should become aware of the emergency resources available to them in the community such as the Red Cross and Volunteer fire departments to help create positive change. Caraballo also stressed the importance of communication in an emergency, making sure that your family and friends know that you’re safe and making sure they are safe as well.
“Preparedness is everyone’s responsibility, and everyone needs to take action and know what hazards could affect them and plan for those hazards. Build a kit so that if you ever have to evacuate or if you get into a situation where you need help you can self-sustain yourself for at least 72 hours,” Caraballo said.
Ayala-Perez extended a thank you to the Alliance for Positive Health for bringing important health training and resources to campus. Ayala-Perez said that he believes any understanding on how to be prepared during an emergency is helpful and a skill that is paramount to life.
“Any knowledge that you can have in case of an emergency is always going to be useful,” Ayala-Perez said. “It’s the kind of knowledge that is going to go beyond your college years.”
