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GCN Home > 01/13/03 issue

Pop-up messages relay alarms at Bureau of Land Management

By Patricia Daukantas, GCN Staff

A loud fire alarm doesn’t tell workers everything they need to know in some emergencies.

The Bureau of Land Management has installed an instant-messaging system that sends detailed instructions to every desktop computer in unusual emergency situations.

It can’t replace standard fire alarms, said Matthew Stewart, BLM’s IT services manager. But it can tell employees, for example, whether to evacuate the building immediately or take cover indoors.

BLM’s Washington staff is spread over two buildings, with 350 employees at one Northwest Washington site and another 60 at the Interior Department 10 blocks away. Stewart manages computer systems at both locations.

“If we have a bomb threat, I need to get some type of message out,” he said.

Stewart and other BLM officials started looking for an emergency-message system immediately after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when many federal employees did not know where to evacuate or to report for work later.

The IT staff looked at about 10 products and rejected those whose messages looked too much like standard desktop error messages. Some limited instant messages to 128 characters or had only canned messages without changeable wording for unusual situations.

“You didn’t have a lot of control over what you were saying,” Stewart said of some products. Bureau officials wanted to be able to tell employees specifically whether an audible alarm meant, say, a cafeteria grease fire, a bomb threat or a chemical spill.

In the end, he installed a messaging app called e/pop from WiredRed Software Corp. of San Diego. BLM tried a 30-day free download soon after the terrorist attacks and purchased the app by the end of September 2001, said Hemini Patel, principal engineer at Northrop Grumman IT of Herndon, Va., a BLM contractor.

Stewart and other BLM officials drafted eight instant messages for different emergency scenarios. Security officials and floor wardens reviewed the prepared messages for compliance with building evacuation plans.

One scenario is inclement weather that sometimes causes the Office of Personnel Management to dismiss workers in and around Washington in the middle of the day.

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