Thrower was recruited from the U.S. to oversee a team of nearly 200 campus security personnel, emergency communications personnel, the student identification division, security and alarm monitoring, and a host of other things as deputy manager of the campus's command and control center.
Thrower is in KAUST as part of a program, instituted by the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO), to provide an all-inclusive training program for communications personnel in the university's new communications center.
KAUST is being built as an international, graduate-level research university dedicated to inspiring a new age of scientific achievement in the kingdom that will also benefit the region and the world. Its core campus occupies more than 36 million square meters on the Red Sea and sits approximately 80 kilometers north of Saudi Arabia's second largest city, Jeddah. The university's goal is to advance its mission by providing and maintaining a safe and orderly learning environment for the KAUST community. As part of this effort, KAUST will staff a 20-person communications center and utilize all of the APCO Institute's training programs and support software.
Laws of Islam Relaxed
The campus, which spans more than 15 square miles, will be completely westernized, which means that some of the laws of Islam will be relaxed within the security walls between Thuwal, KAUST and the Red Sea. Women will be allowed to drive on campus, something that's not allowed throughout the rest of the kingdom.
When completed, the campus will be occupied by more than 20,000 residents -- including students, staff, faculty and their families. The construction consists of 3,500 residential dwellings, 29 academic and administrative buildings and three mosques. KAUST is its own self-contained city. Some of the academic buildings span the size of a football field and are five stories tall with waters from the Red Sea meandering through the ground level.
The emergency communications staff currently consists of eight gentlemen of Saudi Arabian decent, all of whom were hand-picked and exceeded the advertised requirements necessary with degrees in computers and information systems technologies.
"The ultimate goal is to respect the rights and protect the safety of all students, staff, residents and visitors of their campus," APCO International President Chris Fischer said. "We are happy to support this effort by ensuring KAUST communications personnel are fully trained, self-sufficient and prepared to successfully handle fire, EMS or police-related emergency calls."
The training is being conducted over a three-month period and began in April.
Lessons of the Day
Dennis Shepp, a security specialist from Canada who has tenured existence in a variety of places in the Middle East, teaches classes a multitude of lessons dealing with the basics of command and control. During one class, the lesson of the day dealt with academic building evacuations, for which he had the class work as a group to develop a PowerPoint presentation depicting how the students would envision evacuating the administrative building if a bomb threat call were received. The group presented an impressive 20 slides covering a logical gamut of possibilities. The presentation was well thought out and intuitive.
With swine flu being the headline news of the day, I began with my APCO endorsed literature on preparing for the pandemic influenza. From dealing with a H1N1 outbreak in the kingdom, to seminars on how to handle stress as a telecommunicator, to how to communicate with each other and supervisory staff -- the days of learning were flowing like clear blue waters of the Red Sea.
Prior to leaving the U.S, I was fortunate to receive instructor training regarding crisis negotiations from Louisiana State Police trooper Craig Rhodes, who is a member, negotiator and certified instructor for the Louisiana Association of Crisis Negotiators.
Rhodes graciously provided me with the knowledge and tools to train and certify the KAUST telecommunicators in the delicate area of dealing with calls involving mentally ill, suicidal and hostage negotiations until on-scene deployment is in place to take over. This lesson sparked many healthy conversations evolving the foreseen potentials that this profession holds. We went from crisis negotiations directly into diversity and stereotyping.
Throughout these lessons and seminars, this new group of future professional telecommunicators listened to hours of actual calls, video footage and radio traffic. They were now ready to watch videos and hear my heartfelt lecture on the necessity for all of us, not only as emergency communications experts, but just as humans in general to be humble and except that we are all different in this imperfect world.
We began the APCO Public Safety Telecommunicator-1 (PST-1) course at a nice and easy pace. Each Saturday I started the class by handing out newspapers written in English to each of the students. Each student is instructed to pick a relevant article, read it, compose in his own words a summary of what the article is about, and then read it aloud to the class. This is done to strengthen the students' reading and verbal English skills. Since the campus is founded on the western concept, English is required to be spoken by all residents and visitors -- both foreign and domestic.
Our PST-1 course has since finished with amazingly great results. As of the writing of this article, we've concluded APCO Fire Service Communications and are preparing to test this upcoming week. The students also have continuously trained with and studied the APCO Law Enforcement and Fire Guide Cards to which they will receive hands-on testing in the near future.
Soon we will be working more intensively on training simulators. The SAVE Corp. simulation software purchased by KAUST has proven its worth tenfold. The software allows the students to experience what it's like to answer, create, dispatch and assign emergency calls. Along with that, intense APCO Emergency Medical Dispatch training is about to begin.
