Santa Clara University

About E-Prep'd

History of the Program

E-PREP’d is the program that communicates Santa Clara University’s Emergency Preparedness Plan. This program ultimately assists students, faculty, and staff members in educating and preparing themselves for a number of natural disasters. The educational goal of the program is provide information and opportunity for people, particularly undergraduate students, to understand their responsibilities in the first 72-hours of a natural disaster.

In a true natural disaster, the City of Santa Clara, adjoining cities, and regional and state governments will be overwhelmed with emergency responses, and it will be up to members of the campus, each of us working within the context of a campus-wide community, to assist each other through the unknown.

The University has a comprehensive emergency preparedness plan. Information can be found at http://scu.edu/emergency. All members of the campus have been encouraged to familiarize themselves with the plan.

Under the leadership of members of Student Life, e-PREP’d was born from two converging public statements. The first was November 16, 2005 by university President Fr. Paul Locatelli, S.J. when he stated “Part of readiness is ensuring that the campus community is well-informed about emergency procedures.”, and secondly when an article in The Santa Clara student newspaper, January 26, 2006 used the front page headline of “Poll: Few Aware of Disaster Plans”.

In the spring of 2006, in a College of Arts & Sciences Communications class taught by Professor Buford Barr, thirty students divided into five “companies” spent the quarter devising a variety of communication plans and tactics to address the problem of “lack of knowledge”. Their work culminated with highly creative and invigorating presentations. During the ensuing summer an initial team of Nicole Mendez, senior, Sarah Maciel, senior, and Matt Cameron, Assistant Vice Provost for Student Life created a year-long communication plan based upon the best scholarly work of the five company presentations. The logo and theme chosen was called “e-PREP’d” which was the creation of students Nillie Daneshparvar, Pearl Lo, Allison Parks, Tiffany Roberts, David Robles, and Julie Ryder.

Monthly themes selected for 2006-07 are: ‘You and e-PREP’d’ (October), ‘Earthquakes and Power Outages’ (November), ’72 Hours of Emergency Preparedness (January), ‘Fire Safety’ (February), ‘CPR and First Aid’ (March), ‘Earthquakes’ (April), and ‘Beat the Heat’ (May).

Most exciting was an event held on November 15th, 2006, using an earthquake simulator called ‘Quake Cottage’. This cottage simulated earthquakes up to a magnitude of 8.0 – ironically the ‘cottage’ was on the campus the day following an 8.0 earthquake off the coast of Japan. Local television station San Jose NBC11 news carried the activity live and San Francisco CBS 5 carried it as an evening news story. If you are interested, more information in regards to ‘Quake Cottage’ can be found at http://www.safe-t-proof.com.