In recent years, a greater no. of universities have created emergency management units and acquired dedicated staff to manage them.  This example of Rutgers’ experience after Hurricane Sandy is instructive: Hurricane Sandy exposes flaws in Rutgers’ emergency response, report says.

In the teeth of the fiercest hurricane to hit New Jersey in generations, Rutgers University secured its campuses, safely evacuated thousands of students, managed large shelters without incident and maintained crucial data on its vast computer networks.

But Hurricane Sandy also exposed critical weaknesses in the university’s emergency response, including a failure to communicate well with students and staff, a shortage of personnel at the emergency nerve center and, perhaps most importantly, a lack of backup power, resulting in the loss of decades-old scientific research samples.