Making the World a Safer Place
Training begins at OCC’s Combined Regional Emergency Services Training facility
| The FBI, the Secret Service, Oakland County Sheriff’s
Special Response Team, Troy Police Department’s elite Tactical Support
Team…even the British Bobbies are interested in Oakland Community
College’s unique Combined Regional Emergency Services Training (CREST)
facility. “Why’s that?” you may ask. Well, CREST is the only facility of its kind in the nation, and it’s become a national model for providing police, fire and EMT personnel with realistic, scenario-based training – training that’s taken on new meaning and new dimensions since the events of September 11, 2001. And all this interest is occurring before the $15 million facility is even completely finished. The 22-acre site on OCC’s Auburn Hills Campus is already home to three furnished houses, a convenience store and gas station, a replica of a working bank, a motel and a school. It has working traffic signals and sidewalks. Currently, a fire-training structure is under construction on the site. This facility, with its adjacent two-story control tower, will be completed over the next few months. Once finished, the building will be equipped with special technology that will allow firefighters, police and other emergency workers to learn to fight actual fires in controlled conditions. This state-of-the-art building joins OCC’s Swedish Flashover Simulator units that help train firefighters to recognize and deal with a highly dangerous “flashover” situation when all combustibles in a building ignite at once. CREST Director William Furtaw expects that the facility will be fully operational for instruction and training by January 2004. |
 The exterior of the fire-training structure at OCC’s CREST facility takes shape in this June 2003 photo. Over the next several months, technology will be installed that will allow firefighters to train with carefully controlled actual fires inside the building.
CREST has a “Pathway of Honor” leading up to its classroom building. The walk is paved with bricks honoring faculty, staff, community members and area police, fire and emergency services departments and personnel. |
