A new facility in Cranberry Township in helping train first responders.
Cranberry Police Sergeant William Ahlgren said the new Public Safety Training Campus is located in a large area behind the township’s public safety building on Route 19.
“The training campus has only been in place for about a month,” Ahlgren said. ” We’ve used it for some interdepartmental training between firefighters and police officers so far.”
On Wednesday, firefighters and police officers used a mock crash to demonstrate how they study how best to respond to whatever incident they come across. The team also used the crash simulation to remind motorists of the importance of moving over and obeying the Steer Clear Law to promote the safety of the first responders.
“The first goal with our team is getting all the types of responders trained in traffic incident management,” he said. “Hopefully, our plan is to get more creative and do some larger scale type things with this training.”
One of the best attributes of the new facility is it mirrors real-world events.
“We’ve had cars driving through and guys actually deploying stop sticks like they would on the street,” Ahlgren said. “So we have a real world environment that we can do things like this safely.”
Cranberry is part of a Traffic Incident Management (TIM) team that also including PennDOT, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, towing companies and others who meet and study best practices.
