Revisiting BuildingLink’s Emergency Broadcast System
Set It, and Forget It. We Do the Rest.
Hurricane Irene...there’s nothing like a good old-fashioned Category 3 Hurricane
to remind us of how valuable and even life-saving our reliable Emergency Broadcast
System (EBS) really is. Introduced first in 2008, and always ready since then to
spring into action for any sudden emergency, the EBS is easy to overlook day-to-day,
because of its zero-maintenance, set-it-and-forget-it design. (The EBS database
updates itself every night with all the latest BuildingLink resident contact info,
automatically taking into account move-ins, move-outs and other changes, and without
any manager attention or effort.) The zero-maintenance feature is at the very heart
of what makes it so useful – because sudden emergencies happen SUDDENLY, and with
no forewarning. But when they happen – well, your emergency communication system
better be fully ready to go, or it might as well take a seat.
So as Hurricane Irene blew her way up the eastern seaboard (in what we east-coasters
would consider a serious hurricane) and the media predicted wide-spread flooding,
damage, and evacuations, our EBS really got to step out of the shadows and show
off its stuff! In the mere two days before Irene’s arrival, an astonishing 57,000
phone calls and 163,000 emails were seamlessly sent out by the EBS on behalf of
more than 114 different BuildingLink client buildings/properties from Virginia to
Boston.
Now that we have finished examining our performance statistics for those hectic
few days, we’re proud to say that the system kept up with the demand quite nicely.
Our scalable architecture….scaled! And throughout, property managers were able --
with the touch of a few keys and the click of a mouse-- to communicate instantaneously
with thousands of people in thousands of locations.
Yet perhaps more interesting than the sheer quantity of
messages and calls sent, is the diversity of the unique individual situations that
arose – the “stories” behind the Story. EBS phone call/email stories ranged from
pre-storm preparation notifications regarding securing outdoor terrace furniture,
to mid-storm sudden health-and-safety notifications like helping residents navigate
their way around flooded and stuck elevators, and finally to post-storm messages
such as “all clear to return” broadcasts sent to displaced residents in mandatory-evacuation
zones.
So in other words, while we are glad that our EBS system delivered to you the power
that was needed, we are also glad that it found its way into the hands of so many
capable BuildingLink-enabled property managers who deployed it so effectively in
getting just the right amount of information, at just the right times, to all the
right people. Thank you for making our technology look so good!
(For those of you who are not currently subscribers of the BuildingLink Emergency
Broadcast System, may we remind you once again, that sudden emergencies happen SUDDENLY?
Are you sure you don’t have time to call us today?)
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