The blue phones on Grant Campus meant for emergency contact are no longer working, and most of them are not planned to be restored. When used, the blue phones will not connect directly to public safety, as stated in this year’s Annual Security Report, and many others in the past. Instead, you will hear a dead line when you press the button to use them. According to Director of Public Safety, Baycan Fideli, the lines connecting the defunct phones to the public safety dispatch will not be restored because each phone line costs about $8000. “No one’s ever used them, even when they were working,” Fideli said.

Public Safety has not publicly said that the blue phones do not function. The latest Public Safety Annual Security Report issued last month said “Public Safety can be contacted by using any of the emergency phones located throughout the campus.” Director Fideli said the technology is old and obsolete, as most students and faculty have a cellphone they can use in an emergency. Campuses are dropping them across the country, as the costs to maintain are not worth it. Fideli said the phones have never been used in his experience as Public Safety Director and were only used for prank calls in his time working at Stony Brook University.

The emergency blue phones are meant for students and faculty on campus to be able to contact Public Safety directly in an emergency. There are six across the Grant campus, though only five are labeled on the Grant Campus map. Each of them can be described as a yellow pole with a blue light at the top of it, hence the name “blue phone.” The phones have been on campus for several decades, long before everyone had a cellphone like today. Their lack of use has made it undesirable for Public Safety to request them to be restored.

Some phones will be restored, such as the phone near Captree Commons, as it is close to Public Safety and will not be as costly as restoring other blue phones on Campus. Fideli said he’d prefer moving to a newer technology, called POM, short for Peace Of Mind. POM is a key-fob device that a student can use when in an emergency to contact a dispatch service, which then notifies Public Safety about the location of the student using the key-fob. It’s a technology currently being used at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, which is where Director Fideli first heard about POM.

If you do need to contact Public Safety in an emergency, please call 631-451-4242 or 311 on a Campus Phone (not the blue ones).