by ARI PAUL
John Jay College of Criminal Justice President Jeremy Travis believed that his institution was the perfect place for a center on emergency response studies named for a Probationary Firefighter who died on 9/11.
The college lost more alumni in the attacks than any other institution of higher education, he said during the official opening of the Christian Regenhard Center for Emergency Response Studies.
"This is an easy fit for us," Mr. Travis said Sept. 4 at the college's West Side campus, flanked by FDNY members.
The new center will allow academics to study large-scale attacks, fires and natural disasters and to determine what factors in first-response work and which ones do not. Its aim is to publicize the center's findings via the Internet.
Christian Regenhard's mother, Sally Regenhard, held back tears as she welcomed the new center. Following 9/11, she founded the Skyscraper Safety Campaign and has been active in fire safety and widening the investigation into the response to the World Trade Center attacks. The organization's principal adviser, Glenn Corbett, is a Professor of Fire Safety at John Jay.
Along with her husband Al, Ms. Regenhard said the center represented several sides of their late son, not just as a Firefighter but as a science scholar and a former U.S. Marine.
In three years, the center will have a building worth half a million dollars to simulate terrorist attacks and natural disasters for first-responders to train in and for faculty members to examine tactics. It will have a core faculty, but also solicit research proposals on first response from academics from around the country.
Borrowing a Military Tradition
More than that, Mr. Travis wanted to import a culture from the military, where soldiers and officers examine and review the tactics they used in each mission.
"There's no similar tradition for first-responders," he said.
U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler was instrumental, along with U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, in securing the initial Federal funding for the center.
"The response to the attacks was incompetent at best, in the sense that thousands and thousands of people are today sick that should not be sick," said Congressman Nadler, whose district includes Ground Zero. "Many people died — first-responders — who, had our response been better, would not have died."
Public Employees Federation Division 199 Health and Safety Committee Chair Paul Stein was on hand for the opening, and said the center should focus on training community members in first response and correcting safety problems in buildings.
'Still Vulnerable'
"Office buildings, building managements, people who work in high-rise buildings still are very vulnerable to being killed or injured in a major catastrophe because there's not sufficient training going on in emergency evacuation," he said. "The fate of the first-responders is inextricably intertwined with the fate of the people who they're dedicated to protecting and rescuing."
Mr. Stein added, "If buildings are not as well-designed as the center's talking about, obviously responders will be injured in trying to deal with emergencies there."
The center's manager, Professor Charles Jennings, comes from within the college and previously served as the Deputy Commissioner of Public Safety in White Plains.
While appreciative of the Federal funding, Mr. Jennings said his long-term goal would be sustaining the center through funding from city government, unions and other sources.
"I'll be knocking on doors," he said.
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