On Wednesday, Sept. 19, the College will begin a regular monthly test of its emergency warning siren, which was recently installed on the roof of the Reamer Campus Center.

The tests will be conducted at 1 p.m. on the third Wednesday of each month and last no more than a minute. When you hear the siren, please don’t be alarmed. We also urge that you don’t react by placing calls to the Campus Safety Office or local emergency services, such as the Schenectady Police and Fire departments.

In the event of a real emergency, that is an incident which would require us to alert the entire campus community, the siren will sound continuously for up to three minutes. When you hear the siren, if you are in your residence hall or apartment, remain inside and seek information through the College’s Web site (www.union.edu), WRUC (89.7 FM) and UC-TV (Channel 21). If outdoors, seek shelter inside and get further information from the above sources.

Also Wednesday at 1 p.m., we will conduct a test of our new text-message alert system. Since last spring, the College has collected more than 2,300 cell-phone numbers from students, faculty and staff to allow text-message alerts to be sent in the event of an emergency. Only those people who provided their cell-phone numbers will receive the test message. A system will be finalized shortly allowing people to voluntarily update or provide their cell-phone number. Although we will continue to use e-mail alerts in an emergency, we encourage the entire campus community to participate in the text-alert system.

As I stated in my message to the campus community last week, the siren and the text-message alerts are part of our comprehensive Emergency Notification System, which we have been reviewing and refining since last spring.

Thank you for your cooperation during our test periods.

 If you have any questions, please feel free to contact my office at 388-6358.