In addition to a bill that the U.S. House of Representatives passed Wednesday about campus safety information, the University tested its text messaging alert system Wednesday morning and is scheduled to test its siren system this week.

The bill states that colleges and universities must release more campus safety information and issue public warnings within a 30-minute period of any emergency or threat on campus.

According to David Rainer, associate vice chancellor for environmental health and public safety, the time period is not always possible to comply with.

“The 30-minute notification does pose some problems,” Rainer said. “One of the things we’ve always tried to do is confirm an event has occurred before we notify.”

Rainer also said that this notification period could potentially distract emergency responders from responding to the situation at hand.

“Their first job is to respond,” he said. “Their second is to notify. The bottom line for us is we will notify as soon as we have good information and as soon as we can.”

According to Rainer, a big national debate has taken place on college campuses about the legislation and it will continue to be a heated topic.

“[The 30-minute notification] works on a case-by-case basis,” he said. “In some situations, we can respond in 30 minutes, and sometimes, we can’t.”

Chancellor James Oblinger agreed.

“I think back to Virginia Tech and I’m very aware of Northern Illinois and their tragedy. You see that the sooner you can get the communication out into people’s hands, the better off everyone is,” he said. “But you can’t underscore enough the incident-to-incident variation.”

According to Oblinger, in 17 minutes, NIU had communicated the emergency to the entire campus — but it didn’t matter.

“That wouldn’t have changed the outcome, because the shooter had already killed himself,” Oblinger said.

But Rainer said N.C. State is ahead of the curve in preparation for emergencies.

“Virginia Tech shed lighting on issues related to notification and the fact that notification systems do fail,” he said. “As we looked at the available technologies and the limits of those technologies, we decided we needed more notification tools in place.”

And that’s why NCSU has dual notification systems, Oblinger said.

“Because of the nature of the student body and faculty, there needs to be a combination,” he said. “We use them all to reach different people. Not everyone is on campus at the same time.”

The test text messaging alert went out Wednesday around 11 a.m. to students, staff and faculty who had signed up to receive them by Feb. 17. A survey is available online for those who received the message to see how well the service worked.

About 12,000 people had registered for the service as of Tuesday afternoon, which Oblinger said was disappointing.

“I’m surprised at the low subscription rate,” he said. “There have been around 30,000 visitors to the site and only 12,000 have signed up. We’re trying to figure out why they would opt out.”

Rainer said the University will continue advertising the program through advertising placed on Wolfline buses as well as through broadcast e-mails.

“One of the discussions we’ll probably engage in is a lot of campuses are talking about making it mandatory,” Rainer said. “We’ve avoided that to this point, but I think it’s something we’ll discuss on campus to get people’s input on it.”

An installer is also setting up the siren and audio system, according to Rainer.

“The installer is testing the siren system. The University is going to test the siren system on the first Monday of every Monday starting in March at noon,” he said.

Rainer said it will be a standard test time so everybody will know about it, unlike the text messaging alert test — University officials did not disclose the day of the test.

“It’s going to be heard in the community too, so we don’t want to randomly test it,” Rainer said.

One good aspect of the siren system, Rainer said, is that the University can still use it as a notification tool despite power failures, which may hinder notification from other systems like the Web site, because it is battery-powered.

“The siren is a tone and voice,” Rainer said. “So, we can alert you through a tone, which would be shelter, shut and listen. But if we have specific information, we can give make an announcement over the system.”

Oblinger said the siren system is a good form of notification for the campus community.

“It’s nice that they have siren and audio capabilities,” he said. “You can select directionally where you’re making the alert from.”

The vendor is turning the system over to the University Feb. 25, according to Rainer.

Editor in chief Josh Harrell contributed to this report.