The safety of our campus community is our foremost priority. In the interest of public safety, the University of Maryland Police Department contracts with AccuWeather to receive real-time information on storm paths approaching the footprint of our campus community.
When we receive alerts, we call AccuWeather to discuss what impact a storm could have on our campus and decide if a campus wide-alert is needed.
At approximately 5:19 p.m., we received notification from AccuWeather that a tornado may be imminent for our area. Based upon the warning and our conversation with their meteorologist, in the best interest of life and safety, we notified our campus community to seek shelter via text and email and sounded the siren.
At approximately 5:42 p.m., we received an update from AccuWeather that the warning was extended to 6:10 p.m and updated our alert.
At approximately 6 p.m., we received notification from AccuWeather that the warning for our campus was canceled as the rotation had shifted off to the north.
While weather-related incidents are often reported for broad geographic regions, AccuWeather targets the specific footprint of our campus community. Weather monitoring is often monitored on a broader scale, and we issue alerts specific to our community of more than 50,000 to ensure that safety messages are quickly and accurately conveyed to our campus community. As soon as we were alerted that the storm path shifted, we issued an "all clear" message to our community.
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