A new club, Be Aware Save A Life, is working to prevent student injuries or deaths at parties. And they’re doing it in a way that no other club is doing.

Raj Shah — the founder and co-president of BASAL — said he’s seen the consequences of what happens when people don’t know how to identify an emergency situation.

He was at the annual Shasta Weekend event last year when Dylan Pietrs, a UO student and member of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, died of asphyxiation, with alcohol intoxication being “a significant contributing condition,” according to the Shasta County Coroner’s report.

The morning Shah found out, one of his friends said something that set off an idea in his head. “She was like, ‘I wish people knew what to do during these emergency situations,’ and my brain just lit up,” Shah said.

That’s when he decided to start BASAL, as a way to teach students how to react to emergency situations instead of being bystanders. He started researching and talking to UO faculty and found that while there were programs in place to teach students to prevent situations like these, there was little about reacting when the situations arise.

Shah said that he conducted a 100-person survey and found that while 77.8% of people who responded thought they could call 911, 79.5% of people never have. 

“A lot of times the university likes prevention and stuff like that. We think prevention is important, but right when someone drinks that first sip of alcohol, prevention is off the table,” Shah said. “We’re focusing on the response side to this.”

The research gave Shah the idea to create informational cards for students. The cards are small enough to fit in a wallet, and are laminated, waterproof and bendable. They contain lifesaving information: signs that one should call 911, do’s and don’ts on how to treat someone who has passed out. Oregon’s Medical Amnesty Law is highlighted in yellow, stating that if you seek medical assistance for yourself or another person, you will not be charged for possession of alcohol.

“It took a year to make the cards,” Shah said. “Every single one of those information had to be vetted by the UOPD, Eugene Medical Services, all of it had to be credited information.”
BASAL also created posters and does presentations at the UO Week of Welcome as well as at fraternities and sororities.

It’s important to Shah that the university doesn’t really play a role in getting this information to students. He said that originally, UO offered to hand out the cards with them, but BASAL decided to run under a “students looking out for students” model.

“We realized that would take away from what we’re trying to do,” Shah said. “We want to remove that university bias of them trying to say what you should and shouldn’t do.”.

“We needed to have a student to student information transfer. There cannot be any university bias on what’s gonna happen, because that’s when no one starts caring,” Shah said.

Shah said that another part of BASAL was removing the stigma of calling 911.

“I could memorize this entire card,” he said, “but if I’m feeling pressured to not call 911 because I’m at a party, then it’s not really helpful to know all the information.”

The bystander effect is a huge problem at parties, Shah said, but it can also be turned into something positive.

“A lot of times at parties the bystander effect is so heavy. It’s a diffusion of responsibility where you don’t know exactly if anyone else is going to help out,” Shah said. “But if you start helping out, other people will start helping out.”

Shah said that in the future, he wants BASAL to start presenting in university housing, where new students are less experienced with handling alcohol. He said he wants everyone to know about BASAL and to spread it to other campuses. While Shah is a senior, he said he thinks that he will be leaving the student group in good hands next year, and he hopes that BASAL can change how all students react to emergency situations.

“The reality of the situation is that we can’t change that our students are going to consume and drink alcohol and drugs,” Shah said, “but what we can change is the health and safety of those activities.”