FGCU is a school that prides itself on its safety. One system the school has implemented is a series of Code Blue poles around campus.
These 9-foot-tall blue-painted poles are designed to be a way for students in need of immediate help to get in contact with UPD with the press of a button. However, the system has been marred by seemingly constant outages, some on individual units and some campus-wide.
The system, initially installed in 1998, consists of about 100 poles scattered around the main campus as well as the school’s dorm complexes. The poles feature a prominent button that students push to alert UPD dispatch to their current location. The poles also contain a microphone for students to talk to dispatch or for the dispatcher to listen in on the situation.
The latest campus-wide outage of the Code Blue poles was on Aug. 20. Since this outage, many individual poles have been out of service, many for extended periods of time.
Students have been voicing their frustrations with the lack of reliability of the system.
“They never work. I want to put a sticky note on them that says ‘have an emergency somewhere else,’” Nick Fox, a construction management student at FGCU, said.
With the poles’ presence made known throughout campus, it would be assumed that they are used often. However, according to FGCU spokesperson, Rubi Olvera, that is not the case.
“To the best of UPD’s knowledge, the emergency call box and Blue Pole system have never been used for a crime in progress or an emergency purpose,” Olvera said. “The units have been used at a very low frequency for non-emergency purposes, such as a vehicle jump-start.”
This stands in contrast to how FGCU promotes the poles on the Safety tab of the FGCU website. An image of a contact panel of a Code Blue pole is prominently featured at the top of the page. Towards the bottom of the page, the site lists info about the Code Blue poles amongst resources related to topics on what to do in case of an active shooter or sexual assault.
Even though the Code Blue poles are not utilized by students for emergency purposes, FGCU still wants students to know they are an integral part of the school’s emergency preparedness network.
“The emergency call box and Blue Pole system were never intended to be the only avenue to report information during an emergency on campus, but rather another way to communicate [to UPD],” Olvera said.
Students such as Tiffany Pulido are content with the current state of the Code Blue poles.
“I’ve seen some emails where they’re fixing those [Code Blue poles], so I think that’s a pretty big improvement,” Pulido said.
According to the vendor CommGear, the current poles FGCU has cost between $6,800 and $10,900. As well as these original investments, FGCU is looking to modernize the system.
“The university is also in the process of purchasing new equipment. Our goal is to create a more robust, reliable and modern tool to aid in emergency situations,” Olvera said.
