A UNM Police officer entered the Johnson Center weight room pretending to be a gunman as part of a drill Thursday morning.
In seven minutes, about 14,000 text messages and e-mails were sent out, informing students, staff and faculty of the drill, said Lt. Pat Davis, spokesman for UNMPD.
The message said there were reports of a possible shooting on campus and to avoid Johnson Center and the surrounding area.
Davis said the drill went according to plan.
"I think it was successful, especially for the first campuswide drill to test all components of the emergency-response system," he said.
Students can anticipate more drills in the future, he said.
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UNM set up an emergency text-messaging system after the shootings at Virginia Tech in April to inform students, faculty and staff about disturbances on campus. More than 7,000 people on campus have signed up for the system.
There are more than 25,000 students on Main Campus, and the amount of people reached during the drill was not enough, President David Schmidly said.
"When we have an incident like this, you need to reach your entire population," he said. "I would like to think that however we communicate about any tragedy at this institution, we could do a little better than that."
Schmidly said an emergency-management committee and UNM's police chief will make recommendations for how the campus should handle a crisis.
"Not everyone is on their phone or BlackBerry, so we need to look at every conceivable way of communicating with our people in an emergency situation," he said. "There's no substitute for preparation."
Schmidly said planning for the drill began about a week ago.
"After the issue at Northern Illinois, I told the chief of police we needed to have a drill," he said. "There have been a couple of these incidents, and we've put things in place, but we needed to test them."
