University Plans

The Office of Emergency Management, Police and Public Safety, Incident Management Team, key stakeholders and other outside entities have created many plans to ready the campus for various emergencies. These plans are comprehensive, updated and exercised to ensure their functionality. When an emergency situation occurs, these plans make the response period more immediate and impactful. The list below provides a synopsis of certain plans that have been developed. This list does not represent the actual in-depth plans nor is the list inclusive of every plan established for the University.

• Crisis Communications Plan – This plan provides guidance for how the University should respond to a crisis. This includes information such as how and when to send out a NinerNotice or NinerAlert, the roles and responsibilities of each communicator involved in disseminating information, timeliness of the communication and best practices in communicating during an emergency.
• Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) – Contains procedures that can be detailed and coordinated for emergency responders; developed and maintained by emergency planning staff.
• Family Assistance Center Plan – This plan is utilized during major campus crisis situations for the purpose of providing information and connecting people external to the campus (parents, guardians, family members, roommates, etc.) to affected students, faculty and staff.
• Various Severe Weather Plans – UNC Charlotte has multiple types of plans for severe weather, primarily grouped by preparation time. Long lead-time events such as tropical storms and winter weather have similar mitigation efforts as opposed to short lead time events such as tornado warnings and flash floods.
• Business Continuity Plan (BCP) – This plan is a documented collection of procedures and information that is developed, compiled and maintained in readiness for use in an incident to enable campus to continue to deliver its critical products and services at an acceptable predefined level.
• Continuity Of Operations Plans (COOPs) – COOP is a plan to deal with specific sets of adverse circumstances impacting a department or business unit (e.g. loss of power, infrastructure, data, key staff or limited building accessibility.) COOPs provide an opportunity to critically think through such procedures including how to reduce the likelihood of disruption.

The plans above may include certain response teams and locations, such as the following:

• Emergency Operations Center (EOC) – a gathering place for emergency personnel to discuss and execute an emergency plan
• Joint Information Center (JIC) – a gathering place for key communicators to disseminate messages to the campus and media during an emergency
• Family Assistance Center (FAC) – an established location for families and loved ones to gather during an emergency if they cannot locate someone that may be on campus during an emergency