WASHINGTON — Beaufort County Community College invites emergency personnel to its third annual Public Safety Weekend from March 2-4. Fire, emergency medical and law enforcement personnel can take advantage of the classes to fulfill their annual training requirements locally. Instruction ranges from advanced cardiac life support to location accuracy for 9-1-1 call centers.

Each year, emergency personnel are required to attend 36 hours of training, of which 35% can be at a training facility. Public Safety Weekend gives emergency personnel, including the hundreds of volunteer firefighters in the region, the opportunity to fulfill those credits a consolidated weekend at BCCC.

Johnny Williams, director of fire training programs at BCCC, said, “They get to come use the burn tower and the shooting range. We’ll set up some collision scenarios. Life support, fire investigations, and live LP gas training— we’ll have it all.”

These classes give emergency personnel information about emerging issues in their fields and practice in realistic scenarios to keep their skills sharp for when emergencies strike.

“We’re putting in more communications classes this year to focus on 9-1-1 and emergency communications personnel,” said Williams.

A Victim’s Plea: Meeting Expectations is a course put together by the Denise Amber Lee Foundation. Students will take in lessons learned after the death of Denise Amber Lee in Florida. Lee and others contacted 9-1-1 after she was kidnapped and raped in 2008, but communications failures meant that emergency personnel arrived too late to save her. The Denise Amber Lee Foundation was established to train public safety answering point personnel.

Other classes through the weekend include Emergency Vehicle Driving, Pediatric Advanced Life Support, PTSD and Location Accuracy, EKG Review, among others. Early registration for the classes closes on February 23. Late registrations will be taken at the start of the classes, but some classes may not be available at that time.

The weekend will feature several safety and emergency equipment vendors, and Priority Dispatch is providing a free lunch.

The college is in the process of expanding facilities to train emergency personnel. The new facilities will include a driving pad for emergency vehicle training, as well as classrooms and storage space for props including emergency vehicles.

For more information about BCCC’s Public Safety Weekend, visit www.beaufortccc.edu/public-safety2018, or contact Johnny Williams at 252-940-6363 or johnny.williams@beaufortccc.edu.