Fifty TIM planners, leaders, and practitioners gathered at the Tennessee TIM training facility located on the grounds of the Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) July 15-16 in a workshop that is the first step in  practical application and expansion of responder safety training.

Tennesee DOT and THP co-hosted the event with support from the National Operations Center of Excellence, and Federal Highway Administration.  The invited included representatives of towing/recovery, emergency management, transportation, fire, law enforcement and EMS, with half of the group representing Tennessee partners.  Brad Freeze, PE, and Frank Horne of TDOT are leading the effort to create an advanced TIM training curriculum.

The groups broke into four teams facilitated by Gannett Fleming, and each team got an intensive look at two units of the existing curriculum, explored and shared concepts to take the training deeper into discussion, classroom exercises, drills, and functional exercises of the skills needed by responders in actual field settings. A shorter review of another two units was also accomplished by each team.

A curriculum will be drafted to include concepts the workshop participants advanced, and the end result will be a pilot training in Tennessee before the end of 2015. The final product will be a scalable, flexible, practical application of SHRP II Responder Training curriculum might be modified to field training settings.