PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) - People in Providence will now be able to find out about emergencies through their computer. The City of Providence Monday launched its new FLASHbrief system.

The online emergency notification system provides instant alerts on their computer screens in the event of an emergency.

Once residents and businesses download the FLASHbrief program onto the computer, the Providence Emergency Management Agency will be able to send either emergency alerts for natural or man-made disasters or advisory alerts for street closures, parking bans and Amber Alerts.

"This new tool will provide our emergency response team with the ability to reach thousands of residents incredibly fast, with the click of the mouse," said PEMA Director Peter T. Gaynor. " FLASHbrief will be especially helpful to local businesses who must make important management decisions in the event of an emergency."

To get connected click here . Then enter ?Rhode Island?, ?Providence County? and ?Providence? in the appropriate fields and click ?download?. A FLASHbrief icon will appear on the lower, right-hand corner of the computer screen.

FLASHbrief, LLC is headquartered in Orlando, Florida and is comprised of software and network security experts, former military and federal and local law enforcement officials throughout the nation.

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One of four methods Virginia Tech uses to alert students and faculty in an emergency failed Thursday when school administrators attempted to warn the campus about reports of gunfire in a dorm, the university said.

This is the first time Virginia Tech has used its new emergency alert system since the April 16, 2007, massacre. That day, a student gunman killed 32 people and himself, and injured more than 20 others in a rampage that began in a dorm and ended in a classroom building.

ON DEADLINE: Updates on Virginia Tech's scare

A state report that analyzed the university's emergency response concluded that lives could have been saved if the university had notified students after the initial dorm room shooting and had locked down the campus.

University administrators on Thursday issued a first alert at 1:40 p.m. after Tech police responded to a report of gunfire near the Pritchard Hall dormitory, university spokesman Larry Hincker said.

Hincker said police believe that exploding cartridges from a nail gun in a trash bin caused what sounded to be gunfire. He said police believe that two people exploded the cartridge in the bin by slamming the lid.

As police searched the dorm, the university posted a message to the university Web page, e-mailed it campuswide, sent it to electronic message boards in classrooms and relayed it to the VT Alerts system, the school said. The VT Alerts system is designed to send a text or voice message to mobile devices such as cellphones.

The VT Alerts system failed to deliver some of the messages, the university said. Two other messages sent later Thursday afternoon to the VT Alerts system also failed, the school said. "The VT Alerts system did not perform as expected," the university said.

Tech officials said they have contacted the company that manages the system to determine why non-university accounts did not receive the text and voice messages.

The university tested its system on Oct. 8.

The company, Glendale, Calif.-based 3n, said it had experienced a disruption in service for about an hour and a half.

"We are conducting a thorough analysis and once we have more information, we will share it," said Cinta Putra, CEO of 3n.

Since 9/11, some security experts have pushed the idea that peer-to-peer alert systems that rely on openness and the crowd can save lives, particularly when centralized communications and decision-making break down.

As the nation comes to grips with the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, debate will turn inevitably to gun control, youth alienation and video-game violence. Emergency responders, meanwhile, will be asking tough questions about tactics and technology.

Why, given the ubiquity of SMS-enabled cell phones and the growing popularity of social networking and communication tools like Twitter and dodgeball.com, did it take so long for news to reach students that class had been canceled and that students should stay in their dorm rooms?

Next-generation emergency-alert systems have sprouted up across the country, aiming to bring better information and decision-making to disaster scenes. Some colleges are also exploring new emergency alert methods.

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DNorthern Illinois University, where a gunman killed five students and then himself, will assemble a task force to conduct an internal review into how it responded to the shooting, both immediately and in the weeks that followed. The task force, convened by the board of trustees, will also examine broader questions of mental illness on campus, investigating how universities can balance concerns about privacy with public safety. Cherilyn Murer, chairwoman of the board, said she hoped the review would contribute to a national discussion on campus shootings. Steven P. Kazmierczak, a graduate of the university, apparently went off medications before bursting into a lecture hall on Feb. 14 and shooting into the audience of students there.

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After a long day of agony for victims' parents and anxiety for police officers searching for explosives, the authorities this evening removed the bodies of 15 people killed in a massacre at Columbine High School on Tuesday. Among the dead were the two students who are believed to have unleashed the carnage before turning their guns on themselves. They were found shot in the head.

All day long, under sunny skies that turned slate gray with an approaching storm, students gathered near the high school for any news about friends still officially listed as missing. Many were crying or clutching flowers that they had brought to a makeshift memorial.

''I can't even imagine walking into that school right now,'' said 17-year-old Dara Ferguson, a junior, who had three friends whom she feared were dead. ''I don't think I ever want to set foot in there again.''

''If there had been even one armed guard in the school, he could have saved a lot of lives and perhaps ended the whole thing instantly,'' he said today in in Los Angeles.

There was, in fact, an armed guard at the school.

A sheriff's deputy assigned to the school, Neil Gardner of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department, exchanged gunfire with one of the gunmen shortly after the rampage began at 11:30 A.M. Two other patrol officers fired some shots about a half-hour later, said Steve Davis, a sheriff's spokesman.

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For half a century, there was not much change in this tiny eddy off the Garden State Parkway, until Monday night, when Winfield's little school, with an enrollment of 150 children, burned down.

"We don't have a church. It was the hub. It was the very core of the community," Mr. Greig said.

John Sims, a 13-year-old eighth grader, wondered where his graduation ceremony from the only school he has ever attended will be held. "You think it can't happen here," he said "Nothing bad ever happened here. Nothing dangerous. Some people think the Fire Department could not control the flames because nothing ever happened here."

Some fear that a sense of ease lulled the fire-fighting company into complacency.

It is still not clear how the fire started. Welders were changing the pipes in the old wooden building at the heart of the school, and there had been reports of smoke all day Monday. But the alarm did not ring out until just before 5 P.M., when everyone had left the building. Firefighters said that arson was not suspected.

Children were given the day off as parents and teachers tried to figure out how to keep them together through the end of the school year. For the time being the children are meeting in an overcrowded community center.

Everyone worries that the cuts will drive up the costs of the monthly assessments used to support the town, an average of about $300 per house. But they like the intensive attention for students at the small school, something not available in other blue collar towns. Tears ran down 12-year-old Jessica McMahon's cheeks. "I know the feelings we left in the building were abstract," she said, "but you could still feel them."

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Just hours after two graduate students at Louisiana State University were shot to death Thursday night in a campus apartment building, LSU officials used their new emergency-notification system to send text messages to about 8,400 students who had signed up for the service. Because of a technical glitch, however, an undetermined number of those messages never arrived.

"Some folks who are part of that system did not receive a notification by that particular means," said Sean C. O’Keefe, the chancellor, at a Webcast news conference on Friday morning. "We notified and consulted with the provider of that particular service at about 2 o’clock this morning and worked through a series of issues there. There are some technical challenges that they obviously encountered."

Stuart Watkins, a sophomore who is a member of the student government, said in an interview today that he had never received the emergency text message, despite having signed up for the service. He added that after asking around, "I haven’t spoken to anyone who did receive the text message."

An announcement on LSU’s Web site notes that the service is provided by ClearTXT. Officials of that company did not return calls for comment.

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Most Massachusetts public colleges and universities do not use security cameras, do not have gun-carrying police forces, and do not train faculty and staff to recognize troubled students and employees, according to a critical report that calls for aggressive changes across the state system to prevent campus violence.

The report, presented to the state Board of Higher Education today, also found that few schools have conducted a vulnerability assessment of their campus and one-third of them do not have a mutual-aid agreement with local law enforcement to respond to emergencies.

The 114-page study, undertaken in the wake of last year's Virginia Tech massacre, said the colleges have not done enough to address security concerns. It urged all 29 Massachusetts public colleges and universities to adopt a range of recommendations, including: creating emergency-response plans and notification systems; establishing a multi-disciplinary team to respond to threats and dangerous behaviors; and training faculty, staff, and students to recognize signs of mental illness. The number of college students across the country with severe mental illness has steadily increased in recent years.

Colleges should also conduct vulnerability assessments at least once a year and should offer specialized mental health services for issues such as substance abuse, suicidal thoughts, and eating disorders, it said. Just over half of the schools currently provide specialized mental health services.

"Though the risk of a school shooting is very small, it is also very real and schools must be prepared for the event," the report said.

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Almost half of U.S. high school students feel unsafe in their schools, a survey to be released Wednesday finds. It also reports that students believe their schools care more about athletic achievement than academic excellence.

The High School Survey of Student Engagement finds that only 55% of students feel safe in school; those in cities are more likely to feel unsafe than those in rural areas, suburbs and small towns.

Survey director Martha McCarthy, a professor of education at Indiana University, calls the results from almost 81,000 students "appalling. Students who do not feel secure are not attending to what we want them to: education."

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Students see guards patrolling at night or a video camera monitoring the dorm entrance and think, Nothing bad can happen to me ... People don't know that safety controls are often very lax.

Safe at School?

Students should be comfortable walking the campus both during the day and at night.

As parents confront ballooning college costs and shrinking acceptance rates, they are finding themselves with an even bigger, more basic problem: Which campuses are safe? Colleges seem like idyllic and secure places, and for the most part, they are. But ivy-covered walls can't keep out every bad element. This country's 6,000 colleges and universities report some 40,000 burglaries, 3,700 forcible sex offenses, 7,000 aggravated assaults and 48 murders a year. Other hazards -- fires, binge-drinking, mental-health problems -- are also on the rise.

Of course, that's not what parents and students see on America's serene campuses. There's a false sense of security, says Harry Nolan, a safety consultant in New York City. "Students see guards patrolling at night or a video camera monitoring the dorm entrance and think, Nothing bad can happen to me," he explains. "People don't know that safety controls are often very lax."

The idea that a bucolic university environment can be a danger zone hit home at Virginia Tech last April, when a deranged senior opened fire on the school's Blacksburg campus, killing 32 and injuring many more before killing himself. The massacre was an extreme example of the threats that can lurk on campus, but it focused attention on the new risks students face -- and on what schools are doing to limit those threats.

Students typically feel safe around peers, but 80 percent of all crimes on campus are committed by other students. Alison Kiss, program director for Security on Campus, Inc., an advocacy group in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, says the first six weeks of college require special vigilance. Kiss refers to this period as the red zone and says that's when her group sees a 30 percent spike in calls from student victims: "It's when incoming freshmen are most vulnerable to alcohol abuse, hazing and crimes like acquaintance rape. It's the most dangerous period of a student's campus life."

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