Public Transportation Emergency
Preparedness Workshop
Connecting communities-it's one
of the core operational tenets
of transit systems across the
country. Whether connecting
actual towns and cities,
employees with job centers, or
tourists with attractions and
entertainment venues, connecting
communities is what transit
systems do best.
Connecting Communities is also the Federal
Transit Administration's latest effort to connect the
"community" of transit systems with their local, county,
state and federal response agencies and resources.
Agency interoperability in the event of a natural
disaster, terrorist incident, or other emergency is of
the utmost importance for a community or region's
effective response. The new Connecting Communities
workshop brings together participants from a variety of
agencies, departments, and organizations to foster
dialogue, progress planning efforts, review past
experiences, and identify best practices to improve
overall interoperability during an incident.
The invitation-only, two-day workshops will present a
structured forum in which interoperability - before,
during, and after an emergency - will be a driving
force. Each session will bring together selected
representatives from public transit systems, private
transportation companies, the emergency services,
various levels of transportation departments,
health-care facilities, state, local, as well as the
federal government. The workshops will provide a forum
to discuss all aspects of the challenges of large-scale,
multi-agency response and incident management.
The primary focus of the new Connecting Communities
initiative will be on two types of incidents. First, the
forum will focus on a transit system's and the
community's preplanning efforts for an incident on a
transit system asset or operation. These could include
fires, accidents, or terrorist attacks. Second, the
concept of transit and transportation systems as a
resource during community or regionally-based incidents
will be examined. The role and available resources of a
transit system during an emergency are all too often
overlooked or misunderstood in the planning stage and
poorly utilized in the response phase.
Based on the framework of the National Incident
Management System (NIMS), the new Connecting Communities
workshops combine instructor-led presentations with
interactive exercises and will address the five primary
functional areas of incident management; Command,
Operations, Planning, Logistics and
Finance/Administration.
Possible forum sites include regional areas in;
Washington D.C./Maryland; Florida; Ohio; Texas; New
Jersey; Alaska; Massachusetts; New Mexico; Arkansas;
Virginia; California; New York; Washington (State);
Minnesota; Georgia and Louisiana.
For more information about this program, please
contact:
Christopher Kozub
Associate Director
National Transit Institute
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
120 Albany Street - Suite 250, Tower Two
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-2126
(732) 932-1700, Ext. 249
ckozub@nti.rutgers.edu
