Controlling crises on campus

At 3 p.m. Friday afternoon the fire alarm went off in Harrison College House, sending students scrambling for the stairs.

Eight blocks across campus, the alarm set off a beep in the Facility Command Center.

Within 20 seconds, the phone -- which sits in the midst of nine computers on Command Center Operator Greg Mitros' desk -- rang; Public Safety had called to verify the alarm.

Mitros, along with four peers, are charged with keeping the command center, located at 31st and Walnut streets, running nonstop. Mitros dispatches a team of facilities workers who make repairs in dorm rooms, monitor fire alarms and deal with floods in buildings across campus.

Today, Mitros monitors 150,000 points in campus facilities. The call center receives over 5,000 calls each month, ranging from major floods to mice problems.

"If you watch The Wizard of Oz, everybody always wants to know who the guy behind the screen is. [Command center staff] are those guys," said Mike Coleman, director of operations and maintenance for Facilities and Real Estate Services.

Almost 37 percent of the calls received are "first response" problems like power outages or floods. About 18 percent are complaints about light fixtures going out.

By the time police are called to the scene, "it's out of our hands," Coleman said.

A minute after the alarm sounded, an operator from the facility call center walked in to alert Mitros that students were calling about the situation.

Mitros works with his staff to prioritize the calls. The command center -- which he runs -- responds only to facilities emergencies. Next door to his office, the call center deals with minor problems in dorms.

"We can control the University for the most part [from the control room], and we can communicate with the University from" the call center side, Coleman said.

While students can get in touch with the call center during the day, at night the command center runs the show. When the call center closes at night, all facilities calls are routed to the command center.

Coleman said that they try to discourage routine calls during the night because there is only one operator who is available should an emergency pop up.

"I get all the calls from the students in rooms about 'my light bulbs are out' or 'my bed is broken,'" Mitros said. And while he jots down the information, he usually encourages students to call back in the morning unless the problem is serious.

While Mitros' staff relies on a software program designed to alert individual workers to the specific job they must cover, Facilities officials are looking into purchasing a new program that would allow students themselves to check the status of a complaint they have filed.

But for now, students feel confident that Mitros' staff make it out in a timely fashion.

College sophomore Maria Belenky -- who lives in Riepe College House -- said that while they do not always fix the problem the first time, workers always arrive.

"I don't know if they're helpful, but they're there physically," she said.

The center has undergone a major facelift over the past eight years since its humble beginning with limited technology.

"We had one telephone, a couple of radios and one computer, and then we got two computers," Mitros said.

"When I started out there in '98 I called it the 'closet with two computers,'" Coleman added.

But on Friday afternoon, the command center's resources were out in full force.

The Harrison fire alarm was shut off within 20 minutes of its sounding.

The phone on the command center desk rang to tell Mitros that dust from a trash chute had triggered the alarm.

"It's a growing system and we have to grow with it," Mitros said. "You are always learning something new."

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