TEEX to conduct training and exercises for New Jersey Transit

COLLEGE STATION – New Jersey Transit is partnering with the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) for preparedness and emergency response training, exercises, and on-site exercise planning support.

The training will include five courses of Jurisdictional Crisis Incident Management for Incident Command Post (J CIM-ICP) to be delivered at the TEEX Emergency Operations Training Center in College Station. In addition, six Full-Scale Exercises (FSE) will be conducted at stations in the New Jersey Transit, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), and Delaware River Port Authority (DPRA) of Pennsylvania and New Jersey systems. They have also engaged TEEX for urban search and rescue training.

NJ Transit was among the transportation systems in the Northeast impacted by Hurricane Sandy, which struck the New Jersey coast in late October. As a part of their post-storm analysis and review, they have engaged the services of TEEX in support of their review efforts.

“Our first contact with New Jersey Transit was through our relationship with The Port Authority of New York/New Jersey,” said Mark Anderson, Program Manager with TEEX Emergency Services Training Institute. “Because of our relationship and their successful experiences with TEEX, they chose us to conduct the training for this new contract.”

The schedule calls for training and exercises involving three stations in the northern areas of the transit system, including the Secaucus station, and three stations in the southern portion, including Philadelphia, PA, and Lindenwold, NJ.

NJ Transit is New Jersey’s public transportation corporation and is the nation’s third largest provider of bus, rail and light rail transportation, linking major points in New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia. It covers a service area of 5,325 square miles and provides nearly 223 million passenger trips each year. The agency operates a fleet of 2,027 buses, 711 trains and 45 light rail vehicles.

TEEX is a recognized leader in the delivery of emergency response, homeland security and workforce training, exercises, and technical assistance. The agency is renowned for its incident command system (ICS) training and its disaster management and computer-supported simulation training in managing large-scale incidents through unified command and multi-disciplinary teams. In addition, TEEX has planned and conducted dozens of jurisdictional, regional and statewide homeland security exercises and prepared and delivered scores of after-action reviews.

“Because of Hurricane Sandy and other crises in the Northeast, we have been contacted by other agencies and local jurisdictions that are very interested in our enterprise training in Incident Management/Unified Command and our Jurisdictional Crisis Incident Management — Incident Command Post courses,” Anderson said. “We are also getting calls from city and state jurisdictions, government agencies and transportation agencies on the West Coast and the Chicago areas as well.”