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New Complex Brings Emergency Services as well as Students and Professionals Together

The new Integrated Emergency Services Complex at Northern College is now officially open.

The $19.2-million facility is now home to the school’s emergency services programs, as well as the Whitney Fire Hall, Cochrane District EMS and Health Sciences North Base Hospital.

Timmins Police Service giving an ERT Team demonstration. Photo Credit: Mackenzie Read – Moose FM

The school is celebrating with tours, demonstrations and activities throughout the week. This way the community will get to see the facilities which include:

  • mock courtroom
  • jail cell
  • exterior intersection
  • interview and fingerprint rooms
  • scenario labs.

College President Fred Gibbons says it is very exciting to get this building up and running because it allows students to not only learn from professionals working in the field but also how to work together. “Police get trained for police functions, paramedic for paramedic functions and fire for fire. But the idea behind the integrated services building is that these emergency services need to be able to work together and coordinate their efforts more effectively and not be working in silos.”

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ADMS demonstration. Photo Credit: Mackenzie Read – Moose FM

He adds that the new technology that has been brought into this building will help with that. The IESC has an integrated Advanced Disaster Management Simulator (ADMS) which will offer students a chance to prove what they’ve learned in the classroom through scenarios in a true-to-life virtual environment. This system is used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Certainly the simulation equipment that we have will lend itself very nicely to bringing all of these services together to an incident command centre if you will. So they develop protocols irrespective of who’s first on the scene, everyone will know what one another is doing taking the guesswork out of it.”

Gibbons says he is relieved to see this building now up and running because it has been a long time in the making. He says discussions around this complex started up about 15 years ago, but the school “finally got some traction in 2016 when the senior levels of government came through with some funding.” All levels of government have helped, with the provincial and federal government each giving $5.5-million, the City of Timmins at $2-million and the college also received a $1.5-million from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation.

Gibbons says up until now the college has had a strong reputation about the caliber of teaching, now that has changed to help push the school even further. “Where we let our students down was with inferior facilities, we’ve changed that today. We have facilities that are incomparable throughout the province, so I think as we begin to spread that word in our marketing and recruitment efforts we will be drawing more students to our programs here, both domestic students and international.”

He adds that this building is not just post-secondary education, but for community emergency services to live and grow together.

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