Whit Monday 2008. A UM staff member who wanted to take advantage of the day off to sort something in her office in the building at Debeyeplein 1 notices an odd smell. It turns out there is a fire on the third floor, but there is no fire alarm. “We found out afterwards that the fire detection system wasn’t working because the electronics had burnt through,” Van Eekeren remembers. “There was a significant amount of damage, over a million euros.” The fact that – were it not for this accidental discovery – things could have been much, much worse is made readily apparent the very next day, when a building at TU Delft completely catches fire and partially collapses.
Or that day in the summer of 2016, when it could have gone very wrong at the university building at Tongersestraat 53, after road workers accidentally hit a high-pressure gas line. “We had to rapidly evacuate four buildings, including painters and the workmen working on the roof. If anybody had lit a cigarette by the gate...” And then, of course, there was the cyber attack during the 2019 Christmas period, during which all the internal UM systems were taken offline. “That meant that cameras and fire alarms, for example, were also cut off from the outside world. We set up our own control room in less than two hours. Those were a hectic couple of days, with lots of people working overtime.”
All of them are incidents that have stayed with Van Eekeren since he started at UM in 2002. For much of that time, he was the head of emergency organisation (HCO): the person in charge of large-scale incidents at the university. Anything from fires and reanimation (“over the last few years, we’ve had to use the AED three times, all successful, thankfully”), to suicides and bomb threats – such as the one at the city centre university library in 2022, which turned out to be a false alarm. “They are situations where you have to make a lot of decisions in a short space of time.”
Private life
It is a role that has a significant impact on your private life, says Van Eekeren. “You always have to be available and be able to get to the incident location within quarter of an hour – evenings, nights, weekends. That means no drinking, no trips to the theatre or weekends away. That has an impact on the people around you, too. It’s fine if they ring me at night, but my wife is right there next to me.”
“For six or seven years, I was the only HCO. And when I did go on holidays, when there was a replacement, people would often still call me. I once resolved an issue over the phone whilst on a beach in Venezuela – I’m just glad I didn’t have to pay the phone bill!” Nowadays, there is a team of eight people who each take on the role of HCO for a week at a time. “That’s much better. You can’t do it the way we used to anymore. [Laughing] Although, according to the Working Hours Act, you shouldn’t have done it then either.”
The role itself has also changed, says Van Eekeren. “For example, I sometimes used to have to deal with interpersonal issues between students, or stalking. Now there is a whole social safety team that deals with that instead.” And there are now also a coordinator for knowledge security and a team for cybersecurity. “You notice that security is taken much more seriously. People are more aware of all the different dangers, not least because of everything that’s happening around the globe.”
Labradors
The fact that there are now more security positions doesn’t immediately translate to less work for Van Eekeren. “There are more cases of vandalism and theft. Cars that are stripped or stolen from car parks, heavy fireworks that shattered windows on Zwingelput, and pro-Palestinian demonstrators who destroyed thirty toilet groups and scrawled on the walls.”
Protests are something “we didn’t used to have to deal with much. Maastricht has always been a little more ‘sleepy’ in that sense.” A turning point was the years of demonstrations against animal testing at the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life sciences (FHML). Vehement protest by animal rights activists eventually led to the decision to stop experimenting with labradors in 2015. “Since then we’ve started monitoring more: what could happen? When Russia invaded Ukraine, for example, we watched to make sure Russian and Ukrainian students wouldn’t start fighting each other, which in the end, was not as bad as expected.”
Last year, a tent camp and the occupation of a building at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) by pro-Palestinian protesters formed a new chapter. “The coordination and management of the protests was much better, we hadn’t encountered it to that degree before. Thankfully, we do have contacts throughout the country, so we are kept up to date on any potential issues. We’re more alert.”
Online threats
Another new development: threats to researchers on social media. “It’s very easy to send a quick “You need to die” to someone online. Is that a threat or just a pathetic person? We try to monitor that, aided by others, like the police. The Executive Board is also very alert to threats to researchers. Where necessary, we step in,” says Van Eekeren, refraining from discussing any specific examples.
Aside from ‘our own’ people, there are guest lecturers or visitors who require the necessary security measures. Such as when the then-head of the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) Jaap van Dissel – who had received serious threats from conspiracy theorists during and after the pandemic – was awarded his honorary doctorate at UM in 2021. Or the visit by Israeli and Palestinian ambassadors in 2016. “People like that often bring their own security teams, but you do have to take extra measures yourself, too. It happens more often now, which does actually get rather pricey. You do notice that the people at UM who organise events like that know where to find us now. They don’t want to run the risk of anything going wrong.”
Nagging
Still, Van Eekeren thinks that the response to incidents could be faster in general. “The university is a reflection of society: everything that might go wrong in society happens here, too – from fraud to violence. But you do notice that reputation is increasingly important. Things that people could be prosecuted for are frequently covered up. Maybe I’m just old school, but in my humble opinion, I think that sometimes it’s better to stop attempting de-escalation or leniency, and just intervene.”
However, emphasises Van Eekeren, the role of the Safety and Security team is always to advise. Whether that concerns deploying security personnel or how often evacuation drills should be scheduled – after all, the team also facilitates the training and organisation of emergency responders (BHV). “In the end, the responsibility lies with the directors, the property managers, the event organisers. Some value it more than others. We can’t force them to do anything, but we do always emphasise the importance. For some people, there’s a very thin line between advising and nagging. They’ll ask you, ‘Is that really necessary?’”