How OSU's emergency operations center lead the university through 2025 wildfires
Smoke was the first thing Katherine Rouner noticed.
From her north-facing dorm window, Rouner, a psychology major, watched a brown haze creep over Stillwater on March 14 last year as group chats buzzed and gas stations filled with students trying to outrun a fire they couldn’t see. She grabbed her keys and drove south to a friend’s place, only to find empty pumps and long lines.
Rouner remembers the scramble at the pumps more than anything else.
“Everybody was freaking out and the pumps were dry,” Rouner said.
A few blocks away, in a windowless basement most students never see, the day looked different.
The emergency operations center, a hardened “war room” with a generator, independent air system and a conference table that rises to reveal a tangle of power and data ports is in the lower level of University Health Services. On wildfire days like last March, the center flipped from quiet monitoring mode into full activation. This is where university leaders, police, emergency managers and communicators gather when things go wrong on or near campus, whether it is a wildfire pushing smoke over Stillwater, a tornado warning moving across Payne County or 40,000 people packed into Boone Pickens Stadium for a Boys From Oklahoma concert.
State and local officials estimated that more than 26,000 acres burned in and around Payne County on March 14 and the fires destroyed or damaged nearly 100 homes in and around Stillwater.
‘Every incident is handled the same way’
For OSU Police Chief Michael Beckner, the March wildfires were his first major activation in Stillwater. He remembers watching conditions deteriorate through the afternoon, rising winds, smoke pushing toward campus, phone calls from parents across the country who were seeing alarming TV coverage but had no idea where those evacuation maps were.
“We were monitoring it at 3 o’clock and it just progressively got worse,” Beckner said.
Smoke was going to affect campus, Lake Carl Blackwell was in the path, and assisted living centers needed help moving residents.
“Our community needed to get information to understand what was going on,” Beckner said.
From the operations center, staff could pull up fire updates, watch weather, traffic and coordinated with city and state partners. One of the first big decisions involved rerouting OSU buses to help evacuate nursing homes and lake residents, disrupting regular transit service. Officials also ordered an evacuation at Lake Carl Blackwell, knowing some RVs and campers might not make it out in time.
“Every incident is handled the same way,” Beckner said. “The elements are just different.”
Wildfire, tornado, mass‑evacuation, the template does not change, he said, only the hazard. Making calls people don’t like in the moment, like telling them to leave, is the hard part is.
“You can replace property,” Beckner said. “You can’t replace life.”
The basement room built for bad days
Capt. Dan Ray has spent 26 years with OSU Police. He runs emergency management and oversees the room. If he had 30 seconds to explain it, Ray said, he would say it is the place where the university’s decision‑makers go when they need to manage a major emergency or a big planned event.
On a normal day, the center looks like a slightly overbuilt conference room: a big table, chairs, a wall of screens. Almost everything in it targets a worst‑case scenario. There are levels of redundancy for phones and data, including a FirstNet cellular system that would keep critical communications alive even if the campus network went down.
When the operations center activates, the space changes. The table rises, revealing phone lines, power and ethernet ports for each seat. Representatives from police, fire, facilities, student affairs, housing, athletics and communications take assigned spots depending on the situation. If it is a weather day, emergency management and communications are the first in; if it is a concert or football game, athletics and public safety might dominate the room. The setup is flexible enough to handle a wildfire, a tornado outbreak or a stadium show under the same roof.
Ray remembers several moments when it felt like the room performed exactly as intended. There was a multi‑day, 24‑hour‑a‑day activation during COVID‑19, a tornado outbreak where a meteorologist sat beside them watching radar specific to Stillwater, the wildfires, when every screen seemed to fill at once. He also points to the April 15 Boys From Oklahoma concerts, when the center quietly tracked what was happening inside the stadium and in the city at the same time.
He said people might not expect the tone.
Hollywood likes to show emergency command centers as shouting matches and sprinting staffers. Ray compares the operations center to NASA’s Mission Control instead.
“This area has to maintain a level of calmness,” Ray said. “The chaos stays outside.”
Inside, people have roles, speak in measured tones and try to see the whole picture.
“We are paid to be professional and mitigate the danger,” Ray said. “You don’t see Mission Control losing their shirts, and you’re not going to see that here, either.”
From first ring to ‘chaos coordinator’
If Beckner and Ray are the front‑of‑the‑room faces of OSU’s response, associate emergency manager Travis Eastman is the one keeping an eye on everything in motion. He started in dispatch 18 years ago, supervising the communication center before moving fully into emergency management, and that background shaped the center’s design.
“When something’s happening, a lot of times it’s dispatch that are the first people that receive that call,” Eastman said. “They’re there 24/7.”
When a major call starts, it almost always starts in dispatch: a 911 call about a crash, a smoke report, a medical emergency in a dorm and a storm damage report. On a busy night, dispatchers are juggling officers on traffic stops, reports from residence halls and new calls coming in. In the past, that was also when administrators tended to crowd the room to find out what was happening, a natural instinct that made it harder for dispatchers to work.
The new operations center solves that tension with a single workstation in the back right corner next to Ray’s office. Eastman calls it, with a little reluctance, the chaos coordinator desk.
“I don’t really like the word ‘chaos’ with emergency management, because we want to exude composure and calm,” Eastman said. “But when there’s a lot going on, this is the person that makes sense of it for everyone.”
From that desktop, someone can see the same live computer‑aided dispatch screens, unit locations and radio traffic as the call takers. The coordinator can brief administrators, fire questions back to dispatch and relay decisions out to the field, all without anyone looming over a dispatcher’s shoulder. On football Saturdays or concert nights, that desk links three layers: stadium dispatch handling calls inside Boone Pickens, campus dispatch covering the rest of OSU and the operations center watching the big picture.
During the wildfires, that flow of information turned into a life‑safety decision. The center had deployed officers into parts of the Lake Carl Blackwell area to evacuate residents. As reports came in from fire crews and multiple radio channels, Ray and Eastman realized flames were starting to encircle some of the officers. From the center, they ordered units pulled out of certain roads and redeployed them to safer spots.
Eastman says weather is his favorite thing. On calmer days, his attention is often on the radar. He went through training with Oklahoma’s Mesonet program, which grew out of a partnership between Oklahoma State and the University of Oklahoma to scatter instrument stations across the state. Those sites measure soil moisture and temperature, wind speed, humidity and rainfall, and feed into tools emergency managers can use to interpret radar for themselves.
“Fires are, in a lot of ways, the result of a weather event,” Eastman said. “You’ve had very low humidity, very dry air and really strong wind that day. It has ingredients, just like a tornado has ingredients.”
In the center, Eastman can pull up the same radar feeds National Weather Service meteorologists use, then cross‑check them with real‑time reports coming in from OSU and Stillwater. He watches humidity drop and wind shift on fire days and estimates hail and gusts on storm days.
“Sometimes you’re just making sure a storm does what it’s supposed to do,” Eastman said. “Other times, it’s the difference between a typical spring thunderstorm and a night where sirens and alerts need to sound.”
Either way, Eastman said, communicating in a way that is calm and professional is the goal, even when Oklahoma’s broader weather coverage leans dramatic.
“I want students to know how much the university has committed to safety,” Eastman said. “We’re not often seen, but that doesn’t mean we’re not working behind the scenes.”
Turning bunker chatter into alerts
None of the decisions in the operations center matters if no one knows what to do. That is where the university’s Crisis Communication Response Team comes in.
The group took shape in March 2022, when OSU’s brand management staff started holding lunch‑and‑learn sessions with people who had led the university through tragedies.
Oklahoma State has seen its share of tragedy, university spokesperson Shannon Rigsby said.
“Those meetings were heartbreaking but immensely valuable,” Rigsby said.
From there, the group dissected what it had heard and “outlined roles and responsibilities and began assigning people in a depth chart.”
The team includes about 18 people with defined roles and backups so they can cover multiday situations. It runs at least three simulations a year, rehearsing scenarios from severe weather to threats and major system outages. Rigsby said team members rotate on‑call and activation shifts so that when the operations center activates, someone from the crisis group can be there around the clock.
When the center activates, one or more of those communicators are physically in the room with Ray and his staff.
“Several members of the crisis communication response team were in the EOC for the wildfires, and we set up shifts to continue communication coverage throughout the weekend,” Rigsby said.
During the Boys From Oklahoma concerts in April, the setup looked a little different.
“I was in the EOC, but team members were on stand‑by in case our team was needed,” Rigsby said.
Their job is to turn the fire hose of information in the bunker into something students and employees can act on, Cowboy Alerts, emails, online updates and social media posts that say what is happening, where and what to do. During the wildfires, that meant explaining where the danger actually was, what areas around Stillwater were under evacuation orders and how the wildfires were affecting campus operations. On storm days, it is the difference between a generic “be aware” message and a specific call to move to interior refuge areas when a polygon‑based warning tips over OSU.
Behind every buzz of a phone, there is a small crowd in that room arguing over verbs, double‑checking locations, translating radio shorthand into something a panicked student in a dorm can understand.
What students never see
Students like Rouner do not see any of that. They see smoke, traffic, group chats and a string of alerts.
On March 14, 2025, Rouner watched the sky darken over her dorm, then decided to leave town for a friend’s place to the south.
She remembers the way OSU communicated during and after that day felt different from earlier years.
“I think they’re trying to work on their communication,” Rouner said. “They’ve been texting more, trying to be proactive with their updates.”
Ray understands why most students never think about the operations center. On a normal day, it looks quiet. Even during a crisis, the hallway outside can feel uneventful. That is by design.
“We’re very fortunate to have a university that supports emergency management and public safety,” Ray said.
