8/9/2019 Reinvent Somaiya

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SOMAIYA UNDER ATTACK

The chances of a direct attack on K.J.S.C.E may be very remote but the Somaiya campus presents any

terrorist with a chance to target more than 20000 students who are the future of this country. Therefore

to prepare for such events, the following steps need to be taken.

y There should be a police force on campus with a proper on campus police station that would help inthe event of any disaster. This police station would have a detailed outline of the campus with police

helpline phones all around campus. This would allow them to understand where on campus help is

needed. The station would also have a link to the local Mumbai Police Station to get polic and

medical backup urgently and to a specific area on campus.

y Special evacuation drills need to be practiced to help students evacuate in the times of crisis tospecific safe zones from where evacuation is easy.

y The entrances of all buildings should be monitored by all security guards. These gards would havetechnology on their side in the form of an emergency button. On assessing the situation and

pressing this button, an alarm will be triggered in the building sounding an evacuationy Most buildings on campus have one to two staircases linking all floors. In this case, a terrorist

infiltrating a building would have to just wait and kill of his victims as they try to escape down the

staircase. Also this gives him a chance to have hostages since very few people can escape the

building.

y For the buildings in K.J.S.C.E most people would have noticed that each of the two buildings haveonly 2 operational exits. The rest are locked up. In the event of a crisis, there wouldnt be time to

unlock the exits and people would be trapped. For this reason each exit should be replaced with

modern magnetically held doors, which would open up either at 17:00 when college finishes or

when the emergency button at the main entrance or main exit is triggered.

y The new building being bigger than the older one should have an external emergency stairway atthe back of the building because that would be something that the terrorists (assuming that the

strike only at the main entrance and exits of both buildings) would fail to notice. In such a case

more students and teachers could escape with their lives.

y Finally all doors should be made fireproof in the event that terrorists use arson techniques to flushout students and teachers hiding in classrooms and laboratories.

y This is the final point to stress that all efforts should be made to keep the educational campus safeusing non-violent techniques but in such an event where so many lives are at risk and so few guards

are present to protect the students, it is necessary for the campus police to keep a few rubber bullet

guns and teasers and preferable a firearm in the hands of the most senior official on campus.