The Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) has recently partnered with Dr. Randy Atlas, America’s only architect and criminologist, to deliver a new course, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). CPTED teaches participants to assess the safety of built environments in order to reduce accidents and opportunistic crime. Dr. Atlas is a Fellow at the American Institute of Architecture (FAIA), a Certified Protection…
On the evening of March 27, 2021, an elderly resident walked away from a senior living facility in Hanover Township, Pennsylvania. Peter Garland, Deputy Fire Chief of the Hanover Township Volunteer Fire Company, was assigned Search Team Manager, and local police and fire departments prepared to get the search underway. As it happened, Garland was…
“Ever since I was a kid, I thought, ‘What can I do to help the border region where I grew up?’” Although he didn’t know exactly how he would do this, José Garza always knew he wanted to work to improve the environment along the Texas-Mexico border. For the past 20 years, he has done…
In a lab full of thousands of dollars of scientific equipment, Christine Ramirez shows her fingerprint processing class a makeshift fuming chamber she constructed from an old aquarium, a Mr. Coffee mug warmer, a foil baking tin, and a grate from a grill. Ramirez cobbled together these items to create an environment to stabilize fingerprints, increasing the probability that a crime scene investigator will be able to develop the print. But why do this in a lab that has professional-grade fuming…
As the sun went down on the evening of October 21, groups of emergency responders worked to rescue survivors as part of a training exercise at Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service’s (TEEX) Disaster City® in College Station, Texas. Typically, these training exercises are standalone operations for individual classes, but this October, two courses adapted their…
Like many children, when Hayden Baligad was young, he aspired to be like his father. But unlike many fathers, Hayden’s worked as a Helicopter Search and Rescue Technician (HSART) for Texas A&M Task Force 1 (TX-TF1). Now, at 26 years of age, Hayden is ready to follow in his father’s footsteps. On Wednesday, October 14,…
In March of this year, a bad actor hacked into a Florida water treatment plant’s network, took control of a computer and added chemicals to the city’s water. Fortunately, the hacker exited the system before any severe harm occurred. Nonetheless, this cyber event alerted officials to the danger hackers pose to public health and…
TEEX Water & Wastewater Training Coordinator Steve Ash contributed his subject matter expertise to a series of articles written in American Water Works Association’s magazine Opflow. A team of industry professionals are collaborating to help readers better understand the chemistry involved in water & wastewater treatment. The first of the series of articles can be…
Census data from the past few years indicates that of the 29 million people in Texas, around 7 million speak Spanish at home. Since almost 30% of Texans speak Spanish as a first language, there is a high need for vocational training in Spanish. To satisfy this need, the Infrastructure Safety Training Institute (ITSI) at…
Dr. Jason Moats, Director of the TEEX Testing and Innovation Center (TT&IC), won Honorable Mention for Best Paper in Ethical Robotics Systems at the 2021 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) for a co-authored piece with Dr. Robin Murphy of Texas A&M University. The article, “Responsible Robotics Innovation for Disaster Response,” analyzes 36…
