E-mail alerts may not be best bet in an emergency
In an emergency, is an e-mail message enough to notify people of what's happening so they can take shelter, evacuate or take other evasive action?
That's one of the questions being asked in the wake of Monday's shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech, where 32 students and faculty members were killed in two separate shooting incidents more than two hours apart. The gunman apparently killed himself, bringing the death toll to 33.
Although the first shootings occurred just before 7:15 a.m., officials at the school -- formally known as Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University -- didn't send out a campuswide e-mail about the incident to more than 26,000 students and faculty members until about 9:30 a.m. In that first incident, two students were killed in a dormitory, but no specific information was included in the e-mail; students were simply told there had been a shooting and urged to be "cautious" and report anything suspicious.
