Zombie Attack!

Good news for students at the University of Florida: the school is fully prepared to handle a zombie apocalypse.

According to the Associated Press, UF has a plan for responding to the rise of the undead (along with plans for more traditional problems, like handling hurricanes and pandemics.)

The plan – removed from the university's Web site because of press attention, but still available here – lays out how officials would respond to attacks by "flesh-eating, apparently life-impaired individuals." It helpfully observes that a zombie outbreak could include "lots of strange moaning."

How to better equip the university to handle a day of the dead invading? Among the suggestions: "equip all offices with easily-barricaded doors able to withstand prolonged zombie incursion attempts" and "equip all staff with long range (e.g. rifles) and short range (e.g. hand guns) firearms or other weaponry (e.g. chain saws, baseball bats, LPs) for defense against the infected and to dispatch possibly infected co-workers." (For the record, a university spokesman told the AP that the plan was written by an employee in the school's academic technology office to "add a little levity" to disaster prep discussions.)

And because no plan would be complete without paperwork to fill out, there’s also a form for staff to fill in after they've killed a zombie-infected colleague. Called the "infected co-worker dispatch form," it asks for details of the incident, symptoms (one possible one is "lack of rational thought -- this can cause problems confusing zombies with managers" plus an explanation of why the writer felt he had to destroy the co-worker.

Hey, it's always good to be prepared.

Photo courtesy underbiteman via Flickr.