Principal Investigator / Institution

Program Contact

Program Description

The Alabama Fire College (AFC) Workplace Safety Training program provides training to two worker populations under the Hazardous Waste Worker Training Program (HWWTP) and the HAZMAT Disaster Preparedness Training Program (HDPTP): members and employees of Native American tribes nationwide, and public safety personnel within the southeastern United States. Both target populations face significant health and safety risks due to potential exposure to hazards during emergency response to uncontrolled releases of hazardous materials (HAZMAT); emergency response to disasters caused by accidental HAZMAT releases caused by severe weather events or man-made hostile events; and work assessing and remediating uncontrolled hazardous waste dumps. AFC will focus on the thousands of firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics, police, and sheriff's patrol officers in the Southeastern states where the program has been most active: Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

AFC is joined by the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society to promote the training to Tribal emergency response personnel. This training will include AFC's existing courses in topics such as hazardous materials emergency response, incident command systems, air monitoring, mass casualty incident triage, confined space rescue, illicit laboratory response, hostile event response, and responder safety during natural and man-made disasters.

HDPTP

The AFC Workplace Safety Training program will provide preparedness training to public safety responders in the southeast U.S. and to Native American Tribes throughout the country.   The project will deliver quality training focused on safety for first responders to a disaster, whether natural or man- made. This project will target public safety responders to provide them with training that helps them recognize hazards, assess response actions, and bring some order to the chaos of the disaster scene.

Project Duration

• August 1, 2025 - May 31, 2030 (HWWTP, HDPTP)

Grant Numbers

• U45 ES006155 (HWWTP, HDPTP)

Other Participating Organizations

• Native American Fish and Wildlife Society (https://www.nafws.org/)