Rebecca Wendt knew she was interested in a career in law enforcement when she started working as a minor buying alcohol for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission at just 16 years old. When she turned 18, she became a camera operator for these operations until she went off to college. But Wendt wasn’t gone long…
COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS – On Monday, February 21, the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) held a groundbreaking ceremony, launching the construction of a new classroom and administrative building at the Brayton Fire Training Field in College Station. The 38,692 square foot building will provide centrally located classroom and office space. The first level will…
When you hear about firefighter training, you might think that between the water, smoke and foam runoff, it would negatively impact the environment. But at TEEX’s Brayton Fire Training Field, the largest firefighter training field in the United States, they have environmental responsibility down to a science. Instead of wasting millions of gallons of fresh…
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…
