Named for 9/11 Fireman
Disaster Response Startup is Funded

By ARI PAUL

A center for studying emergency responses to disasters based at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice has received seed money in the 2008 Federal budget through the U.S. Department of Justice.

GLENN CORBETT: Use analyses to adapt.

Glenn Corbett, an Associate Professor of Fire Science and an editor at Fire Engineering magazine, has sought to create the Christian Regenhard Center for Emergency Response Studies, named for a Probationary Firefighter who died on 9/11. His mother, Sally Regenhard, is the leader of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign.

'None Like It'

"If you look nationally, there are centers that study disasters," said Professor Corbett. "There is no place in academia or in the government that looks at the emergency response."

The $178,000 the center has received will be enough to start an Internet-based program, he said. The end goal is to create a center where experts analyze the emergency response to earthquakes, floods, terrorist attacks and wildfires, and identify what responders did right and wrong so the experts can make recommendations to the U.S. Fire Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Professor Corbett pointed to the California wildfires last year and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in addition to the attack on the World Trade Center as proof that such an institute was necessary.

Professor Corbett hoped to have the center's Web site launched by the end of the year. He said he would then apply for more funding.

For Ms. Regenhard, the institute would carry on her son's legacy. In addition to being a Firefighter and a former U.S. Marine, he was an artist and a writer with intellectual interests, she said.

"I wanted something in the academic realm that would have relevance to helping save first responders and members of the public in the future," she said. "I feel that the lives of first responders have somehow taken a second priority."